An Oracle Forms Success story

Question

Hi:
I believe that in the forum we tend to post "I need help. Please help" "Oracle has issues!", etc, kind of topics. I am going to try to change that and will start posting now and then my "Oracle Forms" success stories that will hopefully help us all in sharing when we do something right and not just sharing when we need assistance. By the way, I do realise that there are plenty of great people in this forum already sharing their positive findings, I just would like all of us to start doing it on a regular basis.
Having said that, here is my first success story:
On Friday, I was having a conversation with one of our users and setting her up with our Web based application. Since we are moving her from a character based application, I was emphasizing to her how in the new GUI/Web based application it was important and benefitial to start using the mouse. To this she said "You know Thomas, we use Salesforce and recently we noticed that they have enabled the ability to click on any field and make it editable. Also, she said, you know how in our application we very often find ourselves going to a field and then pressing Ctrl-Y to bring up the full contents of the text. I just think that it would be really great if our new Mouse-enabled application would allows us to simply double click a filed and bring up the full text. Is this now possible? she asked. I paused and ran the request quickly in my head, since I made sure that certain things happened when we converted our Forms from character to Web platforms (i.e. I made sure that we referenced Object Groups to all of our forms), I was able to quickly (within a minute after she finished her question) answer to her that it was possible to accomplish what she described relatively trivially, but that it was still not enabled. Confident in my understanding of the whole app and in the hooks that I had installed during our upgrade, I promissed her that I would have a definite estimate and full answer by Monday.
I went home Friday and went to a school Carnival with my two beautiful children and awesomely beautiful wife (I have been told by co-workers that she looks a lot like Gina Lollobrigida) so I forgot about the request for the rest of the evening. Saturday morning I woke up and the first tought in my head was: I got it! I turned on my computer, coded and tested the solution against a couple of forms in five minutes and convinced my self I was right with my first tought. I then compiled the rest of the forms (around three hundred) and tested a few selective ones and verified that indeed I had solved the problem. I am now ready not only to tell her how easy it but to have her experience it in our development environment first thing on Monday, hopefully giving her a sense for how great our new platform is.
The End
Here is my code:
  IF NOT SUBSTR(RTRIM(RTRIM(GET_ITEM_PROPERTY(NAME_IN('SYSTEM.TRIGGER_ITEM'), PROMPT_TEXT)), ':'), -1) IN ('*', '+') THEN
    DO_KEY('EDIT_TEXTITEM');
  ELSIF :SYSTEM.MOUSE_ITEM IS NOT NULL THEN
    DO_KEY('LIST_VALUES');
  END IF;How did I deliver to all 300+ forms:
We have a form (called base.fmb) that contains all of our common forms objects and an OLB called common_obj.olb.
All of our forms have an object group called BASE_TRIGGERS referenced in.
1) I created a WHEN-MOUSE-DOUBLE-CLICK trigger with PL/SQL above.
2) I added WHEN-MOUSE-DOUBLE-CLICK to BASE_TRIGGERS objec group.
3) I copied BASE_TRIGGERS from base.fmb to common_obj.olb to upgrade object group.
4) I installed common_obj.olb to our UNIX deployment box.
5) I compiled a few of the modules and tested in the app.
6) I ran a full recompile.
Why does it work:
1) The code above written PSEUDOLLY means:
  IF the prompt associated with the field does not end in * or + THEN
    SHOW THE EDITOR
  ELSE
     Execute KEY-LISTVAL
  END IF2) Somebody very smart in our company introduced this neat notation to place a plus sign (+) at the end of the prompt for every field tha has a list of values. Also, that person had an asterisk (*) placed at the end of field prompts that provided drilled down (calling another form o show detail) to another form.
3) Oracle, in a great white paper made me aware of the fact that when converting from character to Web all field prompts needed to be converted from Text to the Prompt property and furthermore, in their great wisdom, to make it easy they actually put a button right on the designer to make it trivial to accomplish.
Hope this is a good start,
Thomas
P.S. If I left anything out or you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Message was edited by:
Thomas Morgan
Message was edited by:
Thomas Morgan

Answer 1

Great idea to post success stories. Kudos for giving step-by-step instructions.
Was the notation using plus or asterisk to signal the user if there's an LOV or drill-down available in place in your character based app or was it implemented during the GUI conversion? This is probably a matter of UI opinion, but does the notation clutter the screen a bit ad did you try other visual prompts? I like the notation because you don't have to click in or tab to the field to see if a LOV is available. That's a big benefit that probably outweighs the issue of screen clutter.