Displaying the current state of an object

display

Display the current state of an object


SYNTAX

display object_id [, object_id ] … [pen = pen_no]

Display the current value of the specified object or objects, which may be any of the following:

window_id

Displays every group and top level control in the window.

group_id

A textbox group or button group. Displays all the controls in the group.

box_id[[subscript]]

box_id[[subscript]]

Displays the current value of the field that is linked to the textbox. Assignment to the field’s contents do not update the screen display. The display command should therefore be used whenever assignment to the linked field may have caused the displayed textbox contents to become out of date.

Multi-row textboxes: the subscript may be specified if the textbox has more than one vertical element (a rows = clause). If no subscript is specified for such a box, the current value of the Sculptor system variable sys.Row is used to determine the element to be displayed. This field may be set by direct assignment or by use of the command setrow.

Note that if the value of sys.Row is greater than the number of rows, automatic wrapping occurs. Subscripts of an indexed field, however, do not wrap unless the Sculptor system variable sys.IndexWrap is set to ON within the program.

If the linked field has more elements than the textbox has rows, then whenever a row is displayed (or cleared), Sculptor links the set of elements containing that row to the textbox. For example, if the textbox has 4 rows and the linked field has 12 elements, then the command

display box_id[6]

indicates to Sculptor that elements 5-8 are currently linked to the textbox. This ensures that the correct element of the linked field is updated. If the user now moves to another row, Sculptor updates the display value of that row so that row 1 would display the value of element 5, row 3 element 7, and row 4 element 8.

Free format textboxes: if the textbox is free format type (the height is greater than 1) then only a single display command is required in order to display all the lines in the box. Each line of text is taken from the corresponding element of the linked array field and displayed.

button_id

Displays the current state of the specified button. If the button is a multi button with a linked field, Sculptor refers to this field to determine the button state (zero = unchecked, non-zero = checked). Otherwise, displaying a button is of limited use, since a button always shows its correct state unless the checked clause:

button_id->checked = TRUE | FALSE

has been used and the new value has not been flushed to the screen.

listbox_id

Updates the display if the contents of the listbox have been changed.

table_id

If the table is empty, the first page is displayed. Otherwise, the current set of lines are redisplayed. This enables the display to be updated if the table contains dynamic data that has been changed.

Different object types may be freely mixed in a display command. The objects in the list are displayed in the same order as they were listed.

pen = pen_no*

This clause is optional. It has no effect on buttons. If it is present, the specified pen from the object palette is used to display the data. If it is absent, the default data pen is used. This may be explicitly declared in the object’s definition with a data_pen = clause. If this clause is not present the default data pen PEN_TEXTBOX_DATA (27) is used.


NOTES

  • Controls in hidden windows may be displayed. The changes are effective when the window is next opened.


EXAMPLE

Display four textboxes and a button

display WeddingBox1, WeddingBox2, WeddingBox3, FuneralButton4, WeddingBox5

Display all controls in the group TextboxGroup

display TextboxGroup