Transoft Developers » UBL

Download the UBL Webinar

Sion Roberts — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:56:27 +0000

Download the entire Webinar from our FTP site. It includes a demonstration of how to add a fully functional graphical front end to an old UBL character based program using UBL Studio:

ftp://ftp2.transoft.com/pub/CDextras/UBL/2011-03-15UBLStudioWebinar.wmv

Don’t miss the UBL Webinar – Tuesday 15th March 2011

Sion Roberts — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:07:47 +0000

Don’t forget to register for the UBL Webinar on Tuesday 15th of March. It will be shown first at 09:00 GMT and repeated again later at 18:00 GMT / 13:00 ET. It will be primarily aimed at the use of UBLStudio to modernize your applications.

Go to www.transoft.com/webinars to register today!

Release: U/BL 5.20

Sion Roberts — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:11:04 +0000

The new U/BL 5.20 release is out and can be downloaded from the FTP site. Please contact customer services for the required passwords. In the new release:

New MSI Installer
Windows Server 2008 ready
Increase Password Length
U/Gi Scroll Back Buffer
New LISTVIEW Command
U/BL GUI demo included
New commands: BEGINUPDATE and ENDUPDATE
SETGUIOPT 68 – tool tips
SETGUIOPT 45 – select printer
SETGUIOPT 64 – Check for existence of file or directory
EDITBOX right and center justify
Configuring fields in UNIX UBLMon job report
BBSHOWSECBAN – always show the banner page
BBMOUSEWHEEL
BBTCPFORCEACK
$S / $P / $D now reports SWAP stack

Please read the release notice for details.

Temporarily suspending print passthrough

Sion Roberts — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:32:56 +0000

When using print passthrough, it is sometimes beneficial to temporarily suspend passthrough printing, for example, to print a progress message. U/Gi recognizes an additional escape sequence to the standard VT220 terminals that is capable of doing this. To implement suspension of print passthrough, put the following line in the TDF (BBTERM):

@(-63) 1b,5b,30,69 : print pass through suspend

To suspend print passthrough, issue a PRINT @(-63);@(-62). IO will now go to the screen only. The @(-62) usually ends the printing, but if it is preceded with @(-63), it will only temporarily halt the printing and not send the job to the printer. To carry on with the print passthrough, issue PRINT @(-61) which is the start passthrough printing sequence.

The following lines are the sequences for turning print passthrough on and off in the TDF:

@(-61) 1b,5b,35,69 : print pass through on
@(-62) 1b,5b,34,69 : print pass through off

Quickly making your character app look GUI

Sion Roberts — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:46:55 +0000

If you need to quickly get your character application to look more GUI, but haven’t got the time to create a new front end using the UBL windows object commands, the following program shows a trick that may help you. It uses a special style of BOXing that looks identical to GUI editboxes to draw around the fields on your screen. You will need UBL and UGi versions at least 5.10 for this program to work. If you are using UGi below 5.20, you will need to change the path at line 50 to a valid image file on your machine.

The advantage of this method is that there is very little change to your existing program. The PRINTs and INPUTs are all left alone. The downside is that it does not provide an event driven style like you would expect in a GUI application. Please note that this method is no substitute for creating a real GUI front end using either UBLStudio or manual coding with Windows Object commands.

00010 WINIT
00020 DIM CUSTNO$[100],CUSTNAME$[100]
00030 IF SYS(100)>=1 THEN
00040   REM *** Do following only if UGi in -g mode
00050   SETGUIOPT(12,”images\TS1.gif”)
00060   SETGUIOPT(20,”5,2″)
00070   SETGUIOPT(20,”3,4″)
00080   REM * background color of box
00090   SETGUIOPT(20,”0, 225 225 255″)
00100   BOX(5,22,5,62)
00110   BOX(6,22,6,62,STAT,1)
00120 END IF
00130 PRINT @(5,5);”Customer Number: “
00140 PRINT @(6,16);”Name: “
00150 INPUT USING “”,@(-10,36),@(5,22),CUSTNO$
00160 INPUT USING “”,@(-10,36),@(6,22),CUSTNAME$

Coming Soon: U/BL Release 5.20

Sion Roberts — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:53:47 +0000

Work is currently in progress on the next U/BL release. It will include:

New improved List Box control
Increase U/BL password length
U/Gi Mouse wheel support
Tooltips
Selecting printer name from code
Configure UBLMON UNIX job report fields
EDITBOX – support for right and center justify
UBL Studio Forms designer “Undo” option

The release is expected to be available in May.

Disabling Menu Items in U/Gi

Sion Roberts — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:43:32 +0000

IMPORTANT: This article contains information about modifying the registry. Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following link to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;256986

It is possible to disable UGi menu items by placing some items in the Windows Registry.

This example disables the “Preferences” menu:

Create the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Transoft \ UGi \ Connections \ Default \ Menus
Add a String value called “Preferences“
Set the value to “0” (zero, without quotes)

Issues with installing U/BL on Vista

Sion Roberts — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:38:35 +0000

As you may well be aware, Microsoft have done some big changes in Vista. One of these is called “Registry Virtualization”. What this does is block any application not running as Administrator from using the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE part of the registry. This is where global entries to the system are kept and also where U/BL stores it’s environment. But instead of just blocking access to it, it pretends to the application that it can write there, but in reality, it is writing somewhere else. This can pose a problem for UBL Server in Control Panel. It may look to you like the environment is completely correct, but UBL keeps coming up in demonstration mode and you can not stop the server. What is happening is that the environment you are looking at is being stored in a location hidden away that will never be picked up by UBL. The solution for this is to run UBL Server as Administrator.

When you first install UBL on Vista and bring up the UBL Server from control panel, it may ask you afterwards if the application worked correctly. You should answer “no” at this point and allow it to be installed as a “legacy control panel application”. If you did say “yes”, then you can still get it to work but you must run it as Administrator. To do this, right-click on the icon and “Run as Administrator”. If you do not get this option, keep the SHIFT key pressed and try right-clicking again.

You must also use U/Gi 5.10 or above with Vista for it to function correctly.

Release: U/BL 5.10

Sion Roberts — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:41:51 +0000

U/BL Release 5.10 is now available to download from the FTP site. As well as several bug fixes, this release contains the following enhancements:

Fix “Terminal line (xxx) not found in BBTTYS” on Vista
SETGUIOPT 63 – display images in Print Pass Thru
Search facility added to UBLMON
Sort on columns added to Windows UBLMON
Additional modes for GUIX 82
GETWOTYPE – Retrieve the type of the Windows object
SETFOCUS message for Windows Objects
BBLOGONTIMEOUT
BBSHLIBTRACE
Increase ADDMENU limit

Please see the release notice for more details. The Unixware release of U/BL will be uploaded to the FTP site in a couple of weeks time.

UBLStudio Release 5.10 is now available in the UBL510 FTP release area. It contains the following enhancements:

Allow BBPROGS and BBSOURCE to be outside project root
Run Current Form toolbar button
Easier way to position controls
Scrolling Immediate Window
Bitmap Buttons
SetFocus event on controls
Support for larger programs

The new version of UBLStudio / TDS uses new installer technology, so you will need to uninstall your old TDS after installing the new one.

Please contact support for your FTP login and password.

Coming Soon: U/BL Release 5.10

Sion Roberts — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:09:04 +0000

A new release of U/BL is currently in development. Release date is expected in the first quater of 2009.

The release will contain:

U/BL:

UBLMON order on columns and “search” facility
Job table to display shared procedure name
Support ENTER on BUTTON command
Fix “Terminal line (xxx) not found in BBTTYS” on Vista
New command GETWOTYPE to find out type of windows object command
New GUIX 82 option to run shell commands like launching default browser

U/BL Studio:

Greater flexibility to make UBLStudio projects fit with your existing BBROOT, BBPROGS, BBSOURCE structure
Improvements in reliability
Specify coordinates of windows object manually for easier alignment
Scrolling “immediate” window to allow easier debugging
Specify bitmap buttons in a form
JPEG/GIF support