Steve’s Blog

It is useful to be able to pass parameters to a form when, for instance, you want to click on a record displayed in a continuous form and open another form to display its details. For data aware forms this is not a problem since the parameters of the query that the form is bound to can be easily set via the third parameter of the OpenForm function as outlined in a previous post to this blog. For non-data aware forms it is a bit more complicated, but not much. (more…)

This quest started when I tried to change the colour of a control in browser side code the same way that it is done in server side code, by assigning a colour constant, like clRed, to the control’s Color property. Imaging my surprise when I got ‘Undeclared identifier’ errors for all of the ‘cl’ constants. After much research and some back and forth with Morfik’s support people I found that there are several ways of setting the colours in browser side code. (more…)

In spite of setting all of the border properties for all of the bands in my main form to ‘None’ and setting all of the border width properties to zero, I was still left with a white stripe between the header and detail bands of my main form. After much messing about I finally discovered that setting the Top property of the various subforms in my detail band to -1 made the annoying stripe go away.

From time to time is it useful to be able to create a form that is wider (or taller) than the subform it is displayed in and allow the user to scroll the form to see all of the data. This is accomplished quite easily by setting the CanGrow property of the containing subform to ‘Scroll’. Then, whenever a newly displayed form is larger that the containing subform, scroll bars are displayed allowing the user to scroll the form back and forth to see all of the available data.

Morfik allows you to define a form with data aware controls that can be bound to a data source. Probably the most useful form of data source is a parameterized query. As the name implies this is a query with user specified parameters that allows you to control which records are returned. The query is defined using an SQL select statement that looks like this: (more…)

As part of a never ending effort to stay on top of new technologies, I have started experimenting with Morfik. Morfik is a programming environment that allows you to build web applications using the programming language of your choice. Supported languages include C#, Object Pascal (Delphi) and Visual Basic. The entire web application can be built using these languages, in a single view of the source where both the browser side code and server side code can be written. There is no need to write or even understand Javascript or to write web services to accomplish your goal. All of this is hidden from you.

Morfik is still in its early stages and as a consequence the documentation is not the best and some things don’t always work the way they should, but overall it is a very impressive piece of technology.

I am going to try to keep up a series of articles outlining the things that I have learned about Morfik that are not necessarily written down anywhere.