by Bill Parker
A5Doc is an optional add-on product for Alpha Five v6. It is great for printing documentation of your database, but I use it more frequently for analysis. These are a few tips that I have used recently. I hope they might expand the ways you use this Alpha Five add-on.
1. Look for bad field references in layouts. When layouts such as forms and reports are opened in design mode, Alpha Five will stop the process and give a message that "Field object references non-existent field" or "Please review the trace window for details" if there is a bad field reference in the layout. If you have many layouts, A5Doc is a quick way to check the validity of fields in all layouts since it also opens each layout in design mode. So document all layouts and if one of these messages is displayed you know which layout to correct, without having to manually open each one.
2. Print a partial script. Sometimes I want to print a section of a long xbasic script to make notes as I make modifications. Alpha Five prints the entire script, which may be more than I want to print. It is easy to copy the section of code to the clipboard and paste to Notepad for printing, but it is even easier to highlight the code in the xbasic editor and press Ctrl-P. A5Doc prints the script name, the range of line numbers being printed, and the script fragment.
3. Look for all Post field rules in the database. Document the field rules. The A5Doc of most field rules contains a text string that matches the rule name, such as "default value". This makes searching easy. However, a post rule does not have a "post" text string, as I found when I did a global search. So I pressed the Research button on the A5Doc main menu to show the Research view (first image below). Going to a record I know has a post rule, I see that the rule has the string "undo", which is something on which I can search. Next I opened the Global Search window. The second image shows a global search for the string "undo" that lists all the fields with a posting rule. So if your Global Search does not initially give the results you need, you can usually find an alternate text string to do the job by looking at the Research view.
If you have questions about how A5Doc can solve a problem for you, send me an email at bill@partec.net.