Aílsom, It is my understanding that formsets were originally included in VFP to help with the conversion of a FPD/FPW screen set.
I believe the reputation of formsets being bad is related to the basis of why they were originally included in the product. The converter/transporter from a 2.6 app will use formsets and add layers and layers to the object hierarchy for a screen converted to a form. It also added a Read Compatibility special mode to the converted form. It really is horrible and a pain to deal with in the designer. The special Read Compatibility also makes the converted form behave differently than a normal VFP form (one such thing is the Themes property set to true will make objects disappear from the form). So are they inherently bad? Not really. Are they necessary? Not really. As others have said, it depends. I personally have not needed formsets for a few reasons. 1) I tested the converter when learning VFP 3 and it left a bad taste in my mouth. 2) I heard from gurus that formsets were evil and should not be used. 3) I did not want the overhead of the formset when running forms since they are not as flexible as my other techniques to coordinate forms. When I need multiple forms to work together I have the forms register with each other and have the object references to make them do what the users want them to do. A formset can help with the references via the thisformset object reference. One of the disadvantages of the formset is the dependency. If you include a form in a formset and wanted to later use the form independent of the formset you have to bust it out, or build another form. It is an all or nothing deal (or you could probably write code to make certain forms invisible if needed, but why when you can have them separate?). You also have a new reference to thisformset which is not something you normally see in code. So if you decide to bust out the form from a formset you have to eliminate these references. All this said, just because a company uses formsets does not mean the system is bad. There are some frameworks out there that use the formset for an application object. Some advantage was determined by the framework designer in this regard. They could have adopted this framework and might be using it because they have to flow with the framework, or recognize some advantage we may not have considered. All this means is I would not judge the software on this alone. I am sure great software was developed that included formsets. Rick White Light Computing, Inc. www.whitelightcomputing.com www.swfox.net www.rickschummer.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
