• A Conditional Object Example
• About Forms and Browses
• Accented Characters
• Adding Users from the Desktop
• Changing Custom Menus and Toolbars at Runtime
• Circular Tabbing on a Form
• Creating a Maximized Application with a Menu
• Creating Alpha Anywhere Help Text
• Creating Alpha Anywhere Help Text - AlphaSports
• Creating and Assigning a Startup Form
• Creating and Using a Conditional Object
• Creating Custom Menus
• Creating Menu Forms
• Creating the InvoiceItemsPie Form
• Creating Wallpaper for Your Application
• Design a Custom Menu
• Designing an Application for Alpha Five Runtime
• Displaying a Form as a Dialog Box
• Displaying the Main Menu
• Dynamic Internationalization for Desktop Application Forms and Reports
• Editing Objects
• Editing System Menus
• Editing System Toolbars
• Filter Builder
• Find by Form
• Find by Key
• Find Text
• Follow Changes and Enters
• Form Editor Control Library
• Form Events
• Form Headers and Footers
• Form Layout - Mouse Cursor Property
• Genies
• Linking to a External Help File Topic
• Managing Style Properties
• Methods for Opening Forms and Browses
• Modal and Modeless Data Entry
• Navigation
• Object Explorer
• OnKey Events on Forms
• Placing a Conditional Object
• Placing a Control on a Form
• Placing Bitmaps on a Form
• Placing Hotspots
• Placing Hyperlinks, Mail-to Links, and FTP Links on a Form
• Placing Lines and Frames
• Placing Subforms
• Prompting for User Input
• Put a Button on a Form to Open Another Form Showing Selected Records
• Put a Button on a Form to Send a Customized Email
• Query
• Querying and Sorting Child Tables on a Form
• Quick Import for a Form or Browse
• Reading From and Writing To the Data Dictionary
• Relative Addresses
• Running a Script with a Function Key
• Sales People Form
• Selecting and Opening a Form
• Selecting the Appropriate View of Your Data
• Setting Form Properties
• Setting Form Restrictions
• Setting the Tab Order
• Specifying a Window
• Startup Form Design Examples
• Synchronizing Form and Embedded Browse Record Navigation
• The Customer Information Form
• The CustQueryReport Form
• The Edit_Customer_Info Form
• The Inventory Form
• The Invoice Form
• The InvoiceItemsPie Form
• The InvoiceReportMenu Form
• The Items Form
• The Main Menu Form
• The Vendors Form
• The Window Bar
• Understanding Levels in a Form
• Using a Dialogasa Search Form
• Using a Form
• Using the Form Editor
• Using the Navigator
• Using the New Form Genie

Methods for Opening Forms and Browses

Description

Using Xbasic you can open a form or a browse layout and you can control which records are displayed in the layout. You can open forms as regular modeless windows, or as modal windows. Browses can only be opened as modeless windows.

For example, the following Xbasic command opens the "Customer Information" form:

dim frm as P
frm = form.view("Customer Information")

Once you have a pointer to the form (i.e. "frm" in the above example), then you can use any of the form methods. For example, say that you wanted to open the "Customer Information" form, and then immediately begin entering a new record:

dim frm as P
frm = form.view("Customer Information")
frm.new_record()

Say that you wanted to open the "Customer Information" form, but only show records for customers from Massachusetts, sorted by lastname. To do this, you would use the FORM.VIEWQUERIED() method:

dim frm as P
frm = form.viewQueried("Customer Information","bill_state_region = 'MA'","lastname")

If you wanted to open "Customer Information" as a modal window, you would use the command:

dim frm as P
frm = form.viewQueried("Customer Information", "bill_state_region = 'MA'","lastname", "dialog")
frm.close()

Note the frm.close() method in the above script fragment. This is needed because when a dialog form is "closed" by the user, it is not really closed, it is just hidden so that the script that opened the dialog can read variables that the user might have filled in on the dialog. For more information on the how dialog forms work, refer to Opening a Dialog Box.

See Also

• Form Functions and Methods
• Browse Functions and Methods