This special training class is being offered for the first time in conjunction with our bi-annual conference, APPX EX-ZOO-BERATION 2006. It is a 3-day class, consisting of six major topics, covering a series of tips and techniques, special features, and items of interest to any and all APPX Application Designers, or those interested in exactly how to accomplish some "APPX Magic". Here are the major topics to be presented:
Graphical design
This session offers a plethora of tips on graphical design. We will cover all you ever wanted to know about widgets and how-to techniques to help make graphical design as smooth as possible. Topics covered will include: an explanation of a widget, running the APPX GUI conversion utility to get you started, running in a mixed environment, how widgets are processed, when widgets can be modified, using widgets to design inputs, menus, and outputs, printing graphical output using PDF, and everything needed to successfully utilize graphical design.
Customize APPX using the 0LC routines
This section will delve into using the routines made available in the 0LC application. You will learn how to add graphics to the base APPX processes to make them fit into your own graphical design plans. We will show how to customize the standard tool bar and pull down menus, add your company logo to standard APPX outputs, the use and review of the usage logs, creating custom disposition screens, and how to use the hook facility to make it all work.
Using 0LA
There are a number of routines available in 0LA that the designer can use to create very sophisticated applications. We will show you how to use the stream functions to read and write files, open a file as a pipe to execute OS commands and have the results returned to APPX, and use open sockets to communicate directly with other devices and processes from within APPX, as well as other routines you can use in your own design.
Tricks of the Trade
This is a How-to session on setting up processes to do some of those neat things you have seen in the APPX demo apps and wanted to copy. For example, we will create processes to change the access path of an input and then position the scrolling image back to the selected record, automatically refresh a scrolling image upon returning from a child process to add a new record, and create a menu selection to change the active company.
Getting the Most From Your Desktop
Exercises in this session will concentrate on how to use the desktop client to enhance integration with APPX and the server. We will see how to move files from the desktop to the server, and from the server to the desktop. We will also see how to open files and applications on the desktop from your APPX process, creating an APPX front-end for document viewing, how to read and write to the client clipboard, and how to play sounds from an APPX input or menu. We will also see how to use AppxODBC to bring your data to desktop applications, such as spreadsheets and report generation tools.
New in Appx 4.3
There are a number of new commands and routines that are being introduced in the release of APPX 4.3. We will spend some time learning how to use these new features. New ILF commands like PUSH and POP will let you build stacks of data values and retrieve them sequentially (like an enhanced STORE/RESTORE). One possible use would be to effectively store a string of commands that can then be retrieved and executed, just like they were entered from the keyboard. There are also new 0LA routines that we will use to copy, rename, move and delete files, make new directories, and create and extract tar backups. Cost: $1500 per student.