A Document Viewer Component using Native WinDev Functions

Early in my career I created a custom document storage solution as part of several of my applications. This led to the Clarion Imaging Templates and later the Imageman Templates, both using third party OCX's. Recently one of those customers wanted some enhancements to their application, and I decided I would rather spend a couple of days converting the application into WinDev, than adding features in C6 that are built into WinDev. My first step was to explore the possibilities of using WinDev native functions to create a document viewer instead of using a third party library. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was and how much functionality was supported directly by WinDev.  The resulting Document Viewer is very light weight and handles most of the normal requirements, its not as powerful as I would like, put it will do for this project until I create a Document Viewer using a third party .net library at some point in the future. At the end of the article you will find a download link for the Component and the source code.

Enhancements to a Clarion Application when converting to WinDev

Many of my clients are asking for updated applications and modern features, that they have seen in some of my latest WinDev Applications. As I began making proposals for several of these conversion projects, I realized that I need a standard general comparison of some of the look and feel, and features that would be include in any application that I convert from Clarion to WinDev. The article that follows is the basis of that comparison.

SQL 101: Inline Views

SQL is a deceptively simple language, there are very few keywords and it doesn't take long to be proficient at simple select, update and delete statements. However SQL is a very powerful language that can be built upon for ever more increasingly complex calculations. This is the first in a planned series of articles on SQL, to assist others in understanding the basic building blocks and recombining them to achieve new heights with SQL. This article will be a quick primer into inline views. Inline views are a concept that is very important to understand as many of your more complex queries can be accomplished with the use of inline views.

A WinDev Approach to Clarion Queues

In Clarion, I use queues quite a bit as a great way to deal with multiple instances of structured data in memory instead of storing in a table or file. WinDev has several advanced data types that can be used, but none of them are the exact same as a Clarion Queue. This includes: Simple Arrays, Associative Arrays, Dynamic Arrays, Fixed Arrays, Composite Variables, Structures, Dynamic Structures, Queue, List, Stack, and then there are memory tables which are not technically a variable type.