Properties of screens: Screen tab

After you have opened a new or existing screen in the Screen editor, right-clicked an empty part of that screen and chose Properties in the pop-up menu, the Screen object properties window opens. On the Screen tab in that window, you determine the general properties of this screen.

Click here for information on how to edit screen object properties in general. And click here to read about how to manage screens in the tree view in the Application browser or in the Screens manager.
On the current tab you'll find the following settings:

Name

The screen name is the name under which the file is referenced internally in Designer. This name should be the same as the file name under which this screen has been created and saved, but must be written without extension (.fmt).
The name should be a concise indication of the purpose of the screen and its type. In Collections applications, screens usually have a type indication as follows: brief display (to specify the initial columns in the Result set view) screen names start with BR_ (e.g. BR_COPY), link screens (to specify the columns in the Find data for the field window) start with Lnk, Query by form screens (not used in Axiell Collections, only in Adlib) with QBF, zoom screens (for zooming in on a linked record) with ZM_. It may also be handy to include a data source name abbreviation in the screen name to indicate where from the data for this screen must be coming. You can use long names.

Screen descriptions

You must provide a brief description of the screen in one or as many languages as you wish: these descriptions will appear on the tab (or the label) of the panel in the running Collections application.

Width and Height

For Axiell Collections, you can leave these settings to their default and ony use them as a visual aid. The blue line marking the width won't be visible and Collections will ignore both settings because the Collections user can make the view displaying the screen as wide or narrow as desired.

Read-only

Mark this option if you'd like all entry fields on this detail screen in Collections to be read-only to users. The option will be ignored for brief display screens.
Note that making a screen read-only is no protection against unwanted editing of a record: users can still edit the fields on such a screen in other ways. If you want to restrict write access to records for certain groups of people, you should use other access mechanisms.

Show empty fields

In the Record details, this option determines whether empty fields will still be shown in display mode or not, by default. When shown, the user can still hide empty fields via the Record details settings in Collections, with the Has data Filter mode.

Help key

This is the name of the Contextual Help topic corresponding to the current screen. If the user of the running application views this screen in display mode and hovers the mouse cursor over the tab and presses F1 (Help), the user will see the Help text associated with this key.

Before screen adapl

Enter or search for the name of the bespoke adapl that you want Axiell Collections to run before a record is displayed in the Record details view. You could use it to fill a field of the Temporary type with the sum of a calculation on other fields, for example, but there are lots of possibilities.

After screen adapl

Enter or search for the name of the bespoke adapl that you want Adlib - after screen adapls are not supported by Collections - to run whenever a user leaves this screen in a running application: this happens for instance when the user switches to a different tab or just before an edited record is saved from this screen.

Note that an After screen adapl should only be set for detailed display screens. (An After screen adapl is never called after a brief presentation screen.)

Object colours

For the currently opened screen you can set a foreground colour for all labels on it*, all at once.

At the bottom of the current properties tab you'll see the Foreground colour option for Labels. (The other colour options have no impact on the display of the screen in Axiell Collections.)
The foreground colour is always the text colour. Click the relevant coloured box to open a standard Windows colour picker. You can select a basic colour, or click Define Custom Colours to choose another colour. Click OK to copy the colour to all field labels.

* Note that the colour which you've applied to individual labels won't be overwritten if you assign colours to all labels at once, like described above.