Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the input, I passed over each of the email I received to Lew (for
some reason he does not get the MailingList emails), and this is his reply:
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Hi Brian,
Thanks for being the focal point of all this -- I know it has taken a lot of
your time.
I'm not sure how to handle the underline / italics problem. Adding italics
would be a lot of work. I think for now I'll just hand out two versions --
and users can take their pick! I guess I'll call these DP6YU and DP6YI. If
you have them both, you can feel free to distribute them. I'll send copies
of them to you and Ralph Alvy later on -- right now I'm very tired and I
don't want to make a mistake, so I'll wait a day.
I'd like to fix the bug Charles Wolf has asked about -- the WP format mode
that puts out the bad header. I added this code because Tim Rude uses it
for spooling DP output to a printer, and it is heavily used. (I think.) I
will gladly change it, but I'm not sure what it needs to be. Perhaps Tim
knows more about this -- can he tell me what's wrong?
In a couple of trial versions I added the "delete panel data" as an option
and in general it didn't perform any better than a subreport to delete the
data. The only speed improvement is for the cases where you have totals
and/or refential integrity interactions; in those cases if I delete the data
with no interaction, it is much faster and not possible to duplicate in a
report. If there are no panel to panel interactions and no text fields, the
data file can just be deleted and the associated index blocks simply made
available.
My intial reaction is that this is a dangerous option and not worth making
it part of DP since it takes up a lot of code space real estate.
The other option of deleting all data in adatabase is cleaner and actually
takes up less space. Since it is very fast and can't be duplicated in
reports, it seems more useful. However, I suspect few people would use it.
Right now my inclination is to leave these options out unless there is some
user that feels they are critically important. DP is already very complex,
and I don't want to add more complexity that doesn't have a high payoff.
As soon as I have my wits about me, I'll prepare a package and send it to
you. As I said, feel free to send the versions to anyone that wants them.
Lew
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On the subject of the output of either <u> or <i> to represent underlining
in a DP memo type field, rather than two independant versions (which would
create a fork in future development), I think that Danny has a good point
about the use of Italics. On modern webpages you rarely see underlined
used as a text decoration, you generally only see bold or italic as simple
decoration; the underline is usually reserved for hyperlinks. Additionally
the <u> has been deprecated in XHTML (probably for that previous reason) and
although all modern browsers accept it as an underline, it is generally
better to use CSS to style underlines, which means that if someone
desperately wanted an underline and all DP was producing was <i> it would
be a simple matter to render that text as underline and not italics.
I have done a fair bit of testing, and everything seems ok to me, however I
do not use DP in the myriad of ways other would use it, so if you would like
to test this version please send me an email and I will send it to you.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and Lew will send the final release in a few days.
For anyone producing HTML, XHTML or XML I think you will find this version
very worthwhile. For anyone using any type of scriping with DP you should
find this version invaluable.
Regards
Brian
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