Upgrade Guide - Prolifics

Converting an ApplicationUnless the -5 switch was used, screens that come out of f5upg consist entirely of JAM7 widgets. These may have different appearance and behavior than they had in JAM 5.The f5upg utility establishes each widget's type based on the rules established forJAM/Pi. Plan on examining each screen to confirm that the conversion operated asintended and to resolve ambiguities that the utility was unable to handle.Running Your Application for the First TimeFor the most part, you can expect your application to run correctly. With minorexceptions, JAM events, JPL commands and library functions all perform as youremember. There are, however, several issues you may encounter.As mentioned previously, there is a new function prototyping feature called fielddereferencing that may cause your code to malfunction. Using this feature, JAM treatsany string not surrounded by quotes as a field name, and attempts to extract a valuefrom it which it then passes to the function being called. If you do not routinely placequotes around individual function arguments you will either need to correct your codeor alter all the function prototypes in functlist.c to turn off the dereferencing feature.This can be accomplished by declaring the functions with the SM_OLDFUNC macroinstead of INTFNC.Users of JAM/Pi should recall that widget types routinely changed from label to textand visible to invisible depending on protection settings and content. This behavior isno longer supported by JAM 7. The easiest way around this change in behavior is tosettle on a single type for each widget for the duration of the screen. In lieu of this you'llhave to rework your code to manage the display in two overlapping widgets ofdifferent types. In addition, you must to explicitly set the hidden property of widgetsto get them to disappear, otherwise they merely deactivate.Another potential issue deals with JAM 5 menus. Menu control strings are now aproperty of the menu fields themselves and, as a result, the control fields no longerhave special meaning. The f5upg utility optionally migrates the content of the controlfields to this new property, but if your code routinely reconstructs these fields, it willhave to be changed to work with the properties instead. Please note that the oldbehavior continues to be supported by Release 5 widgets.Upgrade Guide 4-11