VfpImaging VFP tips and tricks blog: November 2020

2020-11-23

Unicode Controls in Visual FoxPro - A new faster and efficient aproach

As a continuation of my last post - Unicode Button Icons in Visual FoxPro, I decided to keep trying different solutions to bring Unicodes to our controls - specially as button icons.

The most natural option would be to use real Windows Buttons like the sample we have in VFPX - https://vfpimaging.blogspot.com/2020/11/unicode-button-icons-in-visual-foxpro.html

But this brings the con that we would have to make several changes in our legacy forms in order to adapt all codes related to the Click event, and others.

So, I decided to try a hybrid solution - "Draw" a "Static" Win32 control - similar to our VFP Label control over regular CommandButtons and Labels. These "Static" Win controls allow Unicodes, and would allow us to keep all our legacy codes as they are.

So here's FOXYOBJECTS - a custom VFP class that can be tossed in our forms, and will "Convert" all buttons and labels that have contents between the <UC> </UC> tags to unicodes, just like the previous post. This time about 4-5 times faster than GradObjects, with the same result.

If you didn't read the previous post, my goal is to bring some cool icons, the same we see all over in WIN10 UI, specially those from SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS, like shown in the CharMap below:

The usage of this new class is really very simple:

Open the FoxyObjects project
Toss an instance of FoxyObjects to your form
Set your command button FontName property to "SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS" or any other that you desire.
Set the caption property of the button to accept unicodes, by introducing the unicodes between the <UC> </UC> tags, for instance:
greek <UC>03b5 03b9 03c1 03ae 03bd 03b7</UC> - This will show the word "Peace" in greek characters, in any regular font, like Arial, Tahoma, Segoe UI, etc
To get the Printer icon from the SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS, set the commandbutton font to it, and add the following to its caption property: "<UC>E749</UC>"

FoxyObjects brings some few properties, that will be applied to all CommandButton and Label controls that are on the same object level of the FoxyObjects level. For instance, if you want FoxyObjects to apply changes to some selected objects, you can insert them into a container, and add an instance of the class to it. This way, the rest of the objects will not be affected.

By default, it will apply changes only to objects that have the <UC> tag in their captions.

BackColor - Numeric, specifies the background color used to display text and graphics in an object.
DisabledForeColor - Numeric, specifies the color used to display text when the object is disabled.
ForeColor - Numeric, specifies the color used to display text.
MouseOverForeColor - Numeric, specifies the color the object text (and icon) will turn into when the mouse will be over the specified object. If you don't want this effect, store the value -1
lBindAll - Logical, determines that all objects will be affected, even if they don't have the <UC> in the caption. That means that you can change the caption at runtime, and the unicodes will be respected
lBindLabels - Logical, determines that both CommandButtons and Labels will be affected
lBindResize - Logical, determines that whenever any control is resized or moved the label mask will be updated as well.
lBindVisible - Logical, determines that whenever any control is hidden or visible label mask will be updated as well.

The Unicodes can be obtained directly by the CharMap.EXE or all over the web. Here's an excellent starting point: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/segoe-ui-symbol-font

The SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS font comes with Win10, but it is not allowed to be distributed to other OS'. This is not a big deal, because Tahoma also brings several options to us, and we can always work with some of the free fonts available on the web, such as "Material.io". They bring tons of modern and beautiful icons for free. It's really worth a visit - https://material.io/resources/icons/?style=outline

SPECIAL THANKS to Mustapha Bihmuten from Morocco and Leandro Walfrans from Brazil for testing the Pre-Alpha version of the class and for bringing valuable suggestions

FoxyObjects v0.4 Download

2020-11-15

Unicode button icons in Visual FoxPro

A big difficulty foxers have is to update their user interfaces. Since we lost MS support, we need to do almost all UI changes by our own. The Win10 UI today is based in monochrome icons - the ones from the SEGOE UI family - SEGOE UI SYMBOL and SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS. These are true type fonts, that bring tons of icons - the ones that we see all over in Win10.

Unfortunately we can't access those icons directly in VFP, because they use a range higher than the CHR(255) supported by VFP. We still have some options:

1 - Use an ACTIVE-X that supports unicodes

2 - Use "Real Window buttons", that support unicodes - https://github.com/VFPX/Win32API/blob/master/samples/sample_274.md

3 - Get some help from GDI+ - gdiplus.dll and do the drawings for us.

The 3rd option is really nice, but demands a lot, really a lot of work. Fortunately, I did almost all the hard work before, back in 2005, in the GradObjects class, that originally was created to bring gradient backgrounds and buttons to our forms. It recreated every button from the form, and redrawn it to an image file, allowing cool gradient, mouse over and disabled effects.

Having this, I just needed to adapt it, leaving the almost abandoned gradients behind, adding support to unicodes and some adaptations for the mouse over effects.

Here's an updated version of the good and old GRADOBJECTS class, that was intended to generate gradient buttons and backgrounds to our forms back in 2005, in the WinXP times. It's still the same GradObjects, but with some new properties and features.

The usage is really very simple:

Open the GradObjects project
Create a form, add some buttons
Toss an instance of Gradobjects to your form
Set your command button FontName property to "SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS" or any other that you desire.
Set the caption property of the button to accept unicodes, by introducing the unicodes between the <UC> </UC> tags, for instance:
greek <UC>03b5 03b9 03c1 03ae 03bd 03b7</UC> - This will show the word "Peace" in greek characters, in any regular font, like Arial, Tahoma, Segoe UI, etc
To get the Printer icon from the SEGOE MDL2 ASSETS, set the commandbutton font to it, and add the following to its caption property: "<UC>E749</UC>"

The default "GradObjects" properties will bring you a gradient look, but all you need is to change just 5:

BackColor1: Numeric, the RGB of the backcolor
BackColor2: Set it to .F. (false), because we don't need gradients here, do we?
CaptionForeColor: Numeric, the RGB of the forecolor
GradientMode: 0 - We don't need gradients!
SelBackColor: Numeric, the RGB of the backcolor when a button is focused or mouse over it
SelForeColor: Numeric, the RGB of the forecolor when a button is focused or mouse over it

That's it!

The Unicodes can be obtained directly by the CharMap.EXE or all over the web. Here's an excellent starting point: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/segoe-ui-symbol-font

For a more detailed information, please refer to the original post for GradObjects: http://vfpimaging.blogspot.com/2006/07/gradient-objects-with-gdi-revisited_48.html

The "GradObjects" object will transform all CommandButtons, Graphical OptionButtons from the same parent object. Use containers, if you need different effects (or none) to some individual controls in your forms.

Start playing with the sample form "TESTUNICODEBTNS.SCX"

Unicode Buttons Download