k-press.ru - Software

Home

Поиск

Издания

Контакты

k-press.ru

Продолжается подписка на наши издания! Вы не забыли подписаться?

ascContainer in brief

Would you like to get a small Visual Basic that can be embedded in any Windows application? Do you want to supply your customer with variety of interfaces for different circumstances? Probably you want to be able to easily and quickly modify the appearance and functionality of the application? Maybe your customer wants to modify the user interface himself? Would you like to avoid the routine work concerned with data input by using your own scripts?

If your aswer was "yes", ascContainer is just for you.

Brief description

ascContainer is a form designer, implemented as an an ActiveX control. It allows to embed any other ActiveX controls and link them with each other through the event handlers. ascContainer can save the configuration and load those saved configurations. ascContainer realizes the main functionality of the RAD container (like form designer of VB or Delphi). It is independent from the development environment (it provides visual customizing of configurations in run-time). ascContainer can be embedded in any application that supports the insertion of ActiveX controls (Internet Explorer, Visual Basic, Delphi, VC++, MS Visual FoxPro etc.).

Figure 1. ascContainer (in the red frame) embedded in VB application

ascContainer allows to organize interaction between embedded ActiveX controls through the event handlers. The internal programming language is VBscript. The editing of event handlers and for the creation of internal functions is performed in the supplied code editor. This code editor have a syntax highilighting and CompleteWord.

Figure 2. Code editor with opened CompleteWord list

We supply ascContainer with the sample applications. These examples were created in different vizuallization tools and/or RAD tools. After the installation you can find the samples in corresponding subdirectories of the Samples directory (VisualBasic, Delphi, InternetExplorer...). The samples contain the source code of projects and compiled applications. We cannot guarantee that all the applications will work on your computer because they require some libraries that are probably not installed on your system (for example, VisualBasic runtime library) or too obsolete (for exampleб in the case of Windows 95). You can download all the needed updates from our ftp site. More preferred way is to compile the projects just at your workstation. VisualBasic and Delphi examples have identical functionality and their difference is just in features of these languages. We replaced TOleControl class by inherited TascOleControl because we were not satisfied by TOleControl (how to use TascOleControl and some other details can be found in Samples\Delphi\readme.txt).

You can also use the embedded property editor to customize the ActiveX controls.

Figure 3. Property editor.

ascContainer allows to synchronize the values of properties of ActiveX controls without any coding. For this purpose we used the property linking mechanism based on the IPropertyNotifySink interface. It's just enough to choose the names in the Link properties editor (see fig. 4) to make a link between the properties of ActiveX controls

Figure 4. The editor of Property links

You can add event handlers or choose existing handlers using the event editor.

Figure 5. Event editor.

Using the precreated and saved configurations (ActiveX controls sets) you can easily change the appearance and functionality of the application in run-time without any coding. Such a configurations can be stored in separate files. A configuration can be assembled by simple adding of selected ActiveX controls to ascContainer. The ActiveX controls can be linked by using event handlers. The configuration files (note that there are some another ways to save the configuration) can be loaded from running application. Simply do that and the user interface will be changed as you want.

Figure 6. ActiveX control adding dialogue

In the case of an unexpected situation user can create or modify a configuration without any assistance. To do that he must switch ascContainer to the development mode. The The external files containing the configuration settings allow to achieve a very high flexibility in the application updating. It means a separation of the user interface and general program logic. The user interface can be changed dynamically in run-time. The creation of a configuration is simple enough, and this function can be performed by the end user that wants to tune the app for the changed requirements.

We supply a small ActiveX controls set with the ascContainer (Label, Button, Edit, Tab, Frame).

Generally any ActiveX control can be embedded in ascContainer and must work in it successfully. The exception is an ActiveX control created without keeping ActiveX ideology and tightly bound to a specific container (we meen an ActiveX control that uses undocumented container features).

ascContainer provides the access to its content and to the content of embedded ActiveX controls both from the main program and from its internal language (VBScript).

The size and position of controls can be assigned in different units: HiMetric, millimeter, centimeter, Twips, Pixel.

ascContainer can be used for the development of high-level applicaions, requiring a form designer. High precision of ActiveX controls positioning allows to create report generators based on ascContainer.

We already started the work on the report generator based on ascContainer.

Finally, ascContainer can simplify and accelerate the development of the user interface of an application and provide the main functionality of Visual Basic in any part of application. Moreover, this functionality will be accessible in run-time!