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Tabbed interfaces, such as those implemented with Visual FoxPro PageFrames, are useful, but
some users may prefer alternatives. Paul Russell explores an innovative way to implement
multipage forms in FoxPro 2.x for Windows (or Macintosh), and provides a sidebar with tips for
implementing the idea in Visual FoxPro and the character-based 2.x platforms.
By now, most of you have probably become familiar with the tabbed interface style for dialog
boxes. This style was developed for screens that have too much information to display at one
time. For example, the Visual FoxPro Project Manager dialog box has a number of different
"Tabs" across the top, each referring to a specific set of information. This Tab style has become
so standard, in fact, that it has been incorporated as a design tool in Visual FoxPro (see Figure
1).
The FoxPro community is fortunate to have Ken Levy's GENSCRNX with a Tabs driver to
perform the same type of thing in FoxPro for Windows. This tool allows you to have a set of
pages immediately available for a single record, and have all of this information contained in a
single Screen Set.
While this is a useful tool, there are a number of drawbacks. For example, I'm developing an
application with 14 sub-screens that contain information. It would have been impossible to use
the tabbed style and still see what each tab represented (the standard Tabs driver allows only a
single row of tabs that become thinner as more tabs are added). Also, with the standard Tabs
driver, all of the screens are contained within a single Screen Set and all are defined at once. This
displays all of the sub-screens when the screen is first started, which would have confused the
users of this particular application more than it would have helped them.
Requirements of a new style
For this application, using the tabbed style was clearly not the way to go. Instead, I needed a way
to do the following:
• Select any one sub-screen directly, from more than 10 sub-screens.
• Display an obvious visible indicator of which sub-screen was active.
• Be able to select the next/previous sub-screen easily.
• Move directly back to the first sub-screen.
• Avoid displaying all of the sub-screens at the beginning.
• Display text or a bitmap as the prompt for the button.
The solution that I came up with resembles the appearance of the View dialog box in FoxPro for
Windows (see Figure 2). This style displays a set of buttons vertically down the left side of the
sub-screens, and the current sub-screen is indicated by the depressed button. ON KEY labels
were set up so that users could move to the next or previous sub-screen by pressing the PgDn
and PgUp keys. They could move to the first sub-screen by pressing the Home key (while this