Print Preview Promoted To Production-Beta
The entire chain of objects, from report description tables, to data processing and on to rendering and GDI+ class libraries has been verified to work in a development environment to produce a printable and viewable form.
This entire branch of the Form Framework V2 has taken two years to design, write, test and integrate. In all, more than 25,000 lines of FoxPro code and 10,000 lines of C and C++ code contribute to Print Preview. There are still known problems, and several bits of clumsiness that must be resolved before the entire package is moved over to a production environment.
The next step is to further refine the code, and to move it over to classes within the framework, rather than existing in the specially created development classes.
I plan on several refinements to the data server class that will allow a single class to concentrate on one method of grabbing its data. The base class will contain the formatting code, and each subclass will grab the data by different methods. That way, the data server will be more versatile.
Currently, there are two main methods for grabbing data: FORM and FILE. But these methods are specific to the HUD-1 platform, and would not work in another environment. If the data were coming from a SQL database, or a relational database rather than a flat file, or a network protocol, or an object, or a form without the FFForm1 object, the current class would not be able to handle it.
In essence, new subclasses of the data server could be created for a specific application, with only the GetData method overridden and sub-objects (such as WinInet and SimpleINI) added to support the transfer of data.
Another enhancement I have in mind is to encapsulate the rendering engine, data server and script generator into a large containing class that will include object properties to point to the image display, the status and abort controls, and the vertical and horizontal sliders. This class will appear as a prototype in the HUD-1 program, and may be used in other applications.
In all, I anticipate another month or so of work on the migration and enhancements of code over to HUD-1, and then of testing the new Print Preview form. There are several issues that I must work on, especially the scripts for the location-specific tax calculations, but that should not take too much work.
I anticipate releasing the first version of the HUD-1 program in about two months. It won’t have much of a help file, but that’s the breaks.