Flashing and flickering in DataEase.
Over the years some “fixes” have been applied in DataEase to accommodate the introduction of new functionality. Time has always been an issue and quick fixes sometimes implemented. This sometimes resulted in unwanted behavior which over time could be quite annoying.
We have removed some we found seriously annoying. Things like you got a dialog to rename labels every time you wanted to write something on a form and a dialog that told you that DataEase didn’t have the language resources for your chosen language (in windows) and would use English instead.
The latter is quite meaningless since there has not been any language versions for as long as that dialog has been around. The former was introduced with OML (You can now find this functionality by right clicking on the text if you feel for naming your text labels yourself, if not they will get names as text1, text2 …textn) when suddenly all objects got names, even boxes, labels, ovals and pictures.
This leads us to what this article is about, bad flickering in DataEase. The screen updating in DataEase for Windows have never been the best with a constant problem with window sizing and resizing due to the way MDI window classes was used in DfW, but it got worse when OML was introduced, because of managing the refresh of the correct objects (which would have taken some quality programming and time) a complete refresh of all objects on the screen was introduced every time an object changed, like when you move from one field to the next…
As you see, this is a lot of old sins that together makes an unattractive whole, but luckily speed increases in graphics adapters have covered up some of it.
In 7.2 we have partly removed the flickering in Form view (if your form is not larger than your screen), but we have not fixed problems that are caused by the MDI window classes as we will complete change the way DataEase use windows, especially tearing away the dependency that causes all windows to be either in dialog mode or full screen, which also affects the system forms, the catalog and so forth.
One of the worst “flickerers” is DQL which looks really “impressing” when you run one, with a multiple of windows resizing actions, constantly changing toolbars, menu bars etc. We have intentionally not touched this in 7.2 as we are going to replace this in its entirety in 7.3.
All in all the flickering has become better in form view, but we have to again apologise for leaving it in the rest of the product for a bit longer.
By: Ulrik Jacob Hoegh - Krohn posted: 30th June 2009 - 13:44