The new a5_showPopupHelp() makes it very easy to put help buttons on an Xdialog that the user can click for additional help. The help can be defined using Xdialog or HTML. (See example in Learning Xdialog.)

Similar to conditional expressions, enable/disable and show/hide expressions , a5:style allows the style of an htmlhost tag to be a calculated value.

An index of help pages covering Xdialog references, tutorials, and controls.

You can take advantage of a technique for creating MDI Xdialogs. Refer to the sample 'Learning Xdialog' database that ships with Alpha Anywhere and refer to the 'mdi_xdialog_frameworkV8' script. The main difference between the new technique, and the technique described here is that in the new technique, a 'context' is established and the menu and toolbar are instantiated in that 'context'. This is done in the Xdialog's OnInit event. It is no longer necessary to instantiate the menus and toolbars in the onactivate event and then destroy them in the ondeactivate event.

Page links relating to property sheets:

Page links relating to the QReportBuilder

The "Prompt for Text" Action and the "Prompt using Radio Button Dialog" Actions (under the "Dialog Boxes" category) are used to prompt for character variables. Alpha Anywhere contains a special programming language called Xdialog that is specifically designed for creating rich dialog boxes. Xdialog is a superset of Xbasic. A full discussion of Xdialog is beyond the scope of this book. For details on Xdialog, see Learning Xdialog. Action Scripting however, offers an Action that allows you to create simple Xdialog boxes that prompt for multiple variables in a single dialog box. In this lesson, we'll create a dialog box that looks like this: Picture

The A5_OWNER_DRAW_LIST_FMT() function takes a CR-LF delimited list, on an Xdialog, and adds 'owner-draw' formatting command to the list. (See the Learning Xdialog book for information on 'owner-draw' formatting options).

All of the examples presented in this book are available on disk. In the "Learning Xdialog" folder off your main Alpha Anywhere program folder, you will find the "Learning Xdialog" database. Open this database. The main menu appears where you can select the scripts. Of course, this main menu is itself a dialog box created using Xdialog.

Header sections, the Xdialog genie, embedded browses on xdialogs, {Title} command, user defined dock panels and more.