Visual form objects

As we have already discussed, a form consists of visual form objects such as static lines, static text labels, fields and graphical widgets.

Static labels

Static form text is simply any text which is defined in the screen section without field delimiters [|] . This is the traditional way of defining static text information such as field labels.

Static labels have no additional attributes/properties in the Attribute section. When changing to a GUI environment, we strongly recommend replacing any existing static labels with dynamic label widgets (explained later).

Static lines

Static lines, identical to static labels, are line drawing symbols which only exist in the screen section. They do not have any additional attributes/properties in the Attribute section of the form definition.

Text edit field

The text edit field allows to display/enter data and associate them with a program variable or database table field. This is the most common generic form of a field which already existed in the original Informix 4GL language. Text fields are referenced as field tags in the screen section and configured in the attribute section. There is a vast range of additional properties which can be assigned to a text field. Text fields have no ‘class’ or ‘config’ attribute configuration.

Graphical widgets

Graphical widgets can be seen as advanced ‘fields’. The base definition in the screen section and in the attributes section are identical but they have the attribute ‘widget’ which defines what type of graphical widget it is and one or both additional attributes ‘class’ and ‘config’.

The graphical widgets can be categorized in labels, buttons, fields or a combination of them. It should be noted that graphical widgets are only supported in graphical clients and will be rendered as normal text edit fields in text mode clients.

If your application is required to support both text mode clients and graphical clients, you can either create separate form files and query the client type at runtime to decide which form to use, or use only normal edit text fields and reference them as graphical widgets by using the scripting language. It should be noted that both scenarios involve additional programming work and if you don’t have to support text mode clients, we strongly recommend utilizing the graphical widgets.

widget	widget name	button functionality	displays data as text	graphically-controlled manipulation	displays data in an image viewer
Dynamic label	label	No	Yes	No	No
Combo box	combo	No	Yes	Yes	No
Radio button	radio	Yes	No	Yes	No
Check box	Check	Yes	No	Yes	No
Function field	lield_bmp	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Button	button	Yes	No	No	No
BMP button	bmp	Yes	No	No	Yes
Browser	browser	No	No	No	Yes
Hotlink	hotlink	Yes	No	No	No
Calendar	calendar	No	Yes	Yes	No