We have made Clarion 7.2 compatible builds of all our products available for download from our website. You can now go ahead and download the new installs. All subscribers should have received an email from us with the download links. If you haven't please check your spam filter and if you still haven't received it check the email address in your Icetips account or drop me an email to let me know:)

You need to have a valid subscription to be able to download the installs. If you need to renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php and purchase a renewal. If you do not have an Icetips Subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php to purchase.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Softvelocity released Clarion 7.2 yesterday (Friday, June 4, 2010). As I started testing with it this morning, I immediately ran into an old problem with the #RUNDLL template statement which I use in various places in our templates. This was fixed in 7.1 (or around 7.1 somewhere) but before that it would show a harmless GPF message in the output window but would not cause any issues. Well, that was not the case now as it would make the IDE become unresponsive and it had to be killed with the task manager. So this had to be fixed or worked around one way or the other!

After messing with this for a while and not getting anywhere with it, I decided to bite the bullet and reconstruct my old Borland C++ dll in Visual C++ as I have suspected that there are some incompatibility issues between Clarion 7 and the DLLs created by my old Borland C++ compiler. And lo and behold it fixed the problem! Now the new clean installs work perfectly!

I am currently rebuilding all the installs with the new dll and will finish that tonight and will resume testing in the morning. All new builds of our products will be available some time tomorrow!

Arnor Baldvinsson

The past couple of weeks have been on the difficult side for me as I had a bit of a cold and as sometimes happens to me I ended up with an eye infection for most of last week, which does not help with productivity in front of a computer screen! I got a good rest this last weekend and fortunately this nasty infection seems to be completely gone now!

On March 15, we released new builds of all of our products, mainly maintenance for Clarion 7.1 support. We also released a new build of our Runtime which is used by our templates. Unfortunately some of our installs that we released on the 15 had the wrong runtime DLLs, so I suggest that you download the latest build to make sure that you have the correct DLLs. Nothing serious is going to happen if you have the wrong ones and they will be replaced with new builds soon. Note that those runtimes are only used in the templates in the Clarion IDE and have nothing at all to do with what you need to distribute with your applications.

I have been working on further documenting the Utilities and there will be a release early next week with more updates. Currently I'm working on the Controls Class and the File Search Class. I have also been working on research and alpha testing on a new Utilities product, but it has been slower than I had hoped so I'm not planning on a beta release until around the middle of April.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Today we have discovered a problem in the latest Clarion 7.1 build 6849. This problem affects most of our products and will cause a GPF in the program at runtime. What I found out was that the #PDEFINE template statement, which we have used for years to add defines to the project, doesn't fire in this Clarion 7.1 build so classes that depend on their own defines in the MODULE and DLL attributes are not compiled correctly and will cause a GPF when the classes are instantiated.

I have reported this to SoftVelocity's Problem Tracker and I really hope that this will be fixed in the next build.

If you converted projects from Clarion 6 to 7.1 with our products in them, you should be just fine. This only affects templates that you have added to applications in this latest build of 7.1 and possible some of the latest builds as I'm not 100% certain when this stopped working.

I am also looking into an obscure problem in the SQL browse template that only shows up in 7.1, when the GreenBar is being used and only when a new column has been added. After then app has been closed and re-opened the problem goes away and also if the actions for the SQL browse have been entered after a new column has been added. It could be something in our templates or it could be something that is related to the #PDEFINE issue if some statements are not executing correctly.

Arnor Baldvinsson

My client reported a problem when attempting to run our project that was a bit baffling:

"The procedure entry point _18ProtectedHashTable__ct__@FiP15CriticalSection could not be located in the dynamic link library c60runx.dll"

Since all that we are sending back and forth are the applications and no binary files there was no way that we were mixing any binaries up, besides we are using the exact same builds of Clarion 6.3 - 9059 so this shouldn't be a problem at all.

After asking around I found out that the reason for this is that Clarion 7 includes a Clarion 6 compiled version of Topscan, which is not compiled local so they have to distribute the Clarion 6 versions of the DLLs with Clarion 7. In our case, the Clarion 7 Bin path has been added to the PATH variable, either manually or by an installer (we do not know which one if it has been done by an installer). Not just that, it has been added in front of the Clarion6\bin folder in the path causing the Clarion 6 application to pick up the C60RUNX.DLL from the Clarion 7\Bin folder rather than the Clarion6\Bin folder.

After some experimenting, I found that at least for Clarion 6.3 build 9059 I could have both BIN folders in the PATH as long as the Clarion 7 one was after the Clarion 6 one. The Clarion 6 apps still run without problems and the Clarion 7 Topscan also runs correctly and without problems as far as I can tell.

So, IF you want to put the Clarion 7 BIN folder into the path statement, make sure that you do that after the Clarion 6 BIN folder. Normally you do not need to do this, but if you don't want to copy DLLs to the application folder using the PATH do access the binary files is one way to do it.

Update: It appears that if you are using Clarion 6.3 build 9056 it does not conflict with the C60RUNX.DLL file in Clarion 7.

Arnor Baldvinsson

We released two new builds today with minor updates to Outlookbar, build 2.0.122, and SQL Browse build 6.2.470.

We have added support for runtime translation to Outlookbar and also made a minor update to the documentation to clear up confusion about the mimic button option. The install was also updated to make sure it detects Clarion 7.1 installs correctly.

The SQL Browse had an issue with template code that, while it had worked for the past 10 years or so, was just plain wrong and could fail miserably in Clarion 7. It did not appear to affect existing procedures, but new procedures would have a problem and show an error message at runtime and completely lose connection to what columns should be displaying in the browse. As with Outlookbar, we updated the install to detect Clarion 7.1 correctly.

I had planned to get the Thread Limiter out into beta testing today but I had to take some time off last week to prepare for the webinar last Friday so it will not be out into beta until later this week.

You can now download the webinar download the webinar from Clarion Live and watch it. I went through how the Window Fixer works and also just scratched the surface of the Icetips Utilities.

Arnor Baldvinsson

I was doing some php research yesterday and stumbled on this online php book that had some very good information and examples that I could put to use right away. Check it out at http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp It's all online in html format, so there is no PDF etc. but it is easy to navigate with links to previous and next chapter as well as a "Jump to" drop down and a link to the table of contents.

The book has been updated for php 5.2 so it is kept fairly current, which is always a plus with online content!

So, if you are looking for good, free, text on php stuff, check this book out - it doesn't cost you anything:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

Currently there is no direct way to set a fixed filename for any of the output targets inside the Icetips Previewer, but you can easily do this on the report itself, rather than passing the name to the previewer and do it there. In fact this would probably be the preferred method since the report probably should determine the name and location of the resulting filename.

You need to put code into a single embed where you set the filename:

Embed Tree for setting target filename

All the code that you need is just a call to the SELF.SetFileName() method. Please note that each output target has it's own Setup method so if you have multiple output target templates active you will need to do this for all of them. You can pass the filename as a string, variable or an empty string if you want it to open the file dialog in the Previewer when you print to PDF.

Embed for setting target filename

In this case you can use:

SELF.SetFileName('')  

This triggers the FileDialog to open in Previewer when you click on the PDF button.

SELF.SetFileName('myfile.pdf')

This writes the PDF file as "myfile.pdf" to the current folder.

SELF.SetFileName('C:\temp\myfile.pdf')

This writes the PDF file to specific folder, which is probably not what you want to do!

SELF.SetFileName(LOC:PDFFileName)

In this case a variable is used. You can prime the variable anywhere before the PDFReporter.SetUp method is called, or you can do it right before the SELF.SetFileName. Note that the PDFREporter.Setup method is not actually called until the report is in the Previewer so if you use a Global, Threaded variable, you can set this in the Previewer. Since the previewer and the report will always be on the same thread, you can just set this variable to be threaded and then there are not threading issues to deal with.

Here is an example of how this can be implemented. On the report I have changed the code to:

SELF.SetFileName(Glo:PDFFileName)

The global variable is a CString(2049) global variable with the "THREAD" attribute. To do that simply check the "THREAD" checkbox on the "Attributes" tab when you create the global variable - doesn't make a difference if you do it in the Global Data or in the Dictionary.

In the Previewer, all that is needed now is to set the global variable. Normally I would think that you would want to set the filename on the report, but this gives you an idea how to do it on the Previewer also. I have added an instance of our ITShellClass from the Icetips Utilities to the previewer procedure - in the "Local Data" embed I added:

ITS  ITShellClass

Now in the "Local Objects | Icetips Previewer | Clarion 6 Save Buttons | Before Save Dialog"

Embed Tree for setting target filename

I have added this code:

  If GQ.GName = 'PDF'
    Glo:PDFFileName = ITS.GetSpecialFolder(IT_CSIDL_PERSONAL) &|
                      '\MyPDF.pdf'  
    !! Glo:PDFFileName must be be used in the report's 
    !! PDFREporter.Setup.

    If Not FileDialog('Select PDF to save',|
          Glo:PDFFileName,|
          '*.pdf|*.pdf',|
          FILE:SAVE+FILE:KEEPDIR+FILE:LONGNAME+FILE:ADDEXTENSION)
      Message('No PDF File selected, aborting PDF save',|
              'PDF Saving aborted',ICON:Hand)
      Exit
    End
  End

Note the "GQ.GName = 'PDF'". This allows you to just do the PDF if you want the default filename handling for other options. The GQ contains all the target names, such as "PDF", "HTML" etc. At the top of the routine that handles the targets in the Previewer, the correct item is selected from the GQ queue so throughout the routine you can use GQ.GName to determine what is the active target being printed to.

If you find new ways to use this, I would certainly appreciate if you would be kind enough to add a comment to this article so I and others can benefit:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

Roberto Artigas has sent us the latest version of his popular DCT2SQL templates and I have made them available for download on our download page.

According to Robert this new version is compatible with Clarion 7.1. He has fixed some minor issues caused by incorrect placement of #BOXED/#ENDBOXED pairs. And the templates are backward compatible with Clarion 6.3 so you can now use those popular templates on both IDEs:)

Arnor Baldvinsson