Message about several fields

Message about several fields
Hi,

In Delphi or Visual Basic it's possible to show a messagebox that says some fiels are wrong or empty.
For example: the user didn't type the address(a mandatory field) and typed letters in a numeric fields. Then, when the user clicks on button OK, a messagebox appears saying two fields are wrong or are not typed.
My doubt is: how to do the same thing in Blaise???.... I need to show a error message about several fields at a time.
Thanks

Can you be a little bit more specific where and when you would want this?
During data entry using the DEP when you leave a page? Or in a Manipula dialog box? Or somewhere else? Perhaps you can share a source code example.

Batman,

I work with him on the same team. He is talking abaout DEP.
We want to validate all the the fields that have a pending validation before saving and closing the form.

Also it would be helpful if we somehow could access or develop a kind of form status (something like "started", "has errors", "finished" ). Do you know if Blaise (DEP) has a built-in form status like that? Wee need this because we are trying to create a CASI (Computer Assisted Self Interview) application.

We plan on sending this application to some informers together with a module that sends the Blaise data file back to us once the form is finished and all validations solved.

Thanks.

Hi,
To answer your questions I need to know more about what you are doing. For instance: can you explain how you can have fields that have a pending validation?
But, without knowing the details of your application I guess that what you want is possible. It can be done using Manipula within the DEP. For instance: you can activate a Manipula script when the user wants to exit the form and in Manipula you can access all information about the data currently in the DEP. You can for instance then access all errors and display information about them.
An alternative way of approaching it is using Basil, a ‘DEP alternative’ within Blaise. It can be used to program more advanced user interfaces. It also relies heavily on Manipula because you need to program what happens for many of the events available. For an advanced example see: samples\basil\retail (you need to build the project and then run retail.bla).
Be warned: what I described (accessing the rules in Manipula and Basil) are not the easiest parts of the system. Don’t hesitate to ask for help!

This happens if you click the "save & close" button on the toolbar before filling the whole form. Also, as we are using parallel blocks you can click on another tab and leave empty fields.

Maybe showing all errors to the user before closing the form is a bit more complicated then we thought. We’ll need to study a lot more of Blaise to understand this concept.

Something else: If I save the contents of a form to an Oracle database (using the BOI file with flat tables and blocks) Blaise creates a table like that <datamodel name>_FORM. In this table there is a column called “status”. Looking at the data held in this column I can see values like “4” and “1”. Can’t DEP use this status information to tell me if the form is complete or has errors?

Answering your first question: We are a software development team, used to work with visual IDE’s like Delphi and Visual Studio. We are using an evaluation license of Blaise to test if it meets our organization’s standards in applying and processing surveys. For now our studies are being focused mainly on DEP and Blaise Datamodel Language. We hardly know anything about manipula yet.