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Running applications developed in Approach for MS-Windows on OS/2 versions

Last updated: 10 Nov 2002

The main thing to be careful of this that you use only True Type fonts. Otherwise you formatting will probably change.

Obviuously any calls to Windows specific OLE functions won't work under OS/2

This article was submitted by Ward Scarff <wscarff@westernqbe.com.au>:

My experiences with apps developed on Win, then run on Os/2 operating
system, is restricted to A3.x and A97 (not more recent versions). However, I hope the following items do not hinder your implementation ...

• language settings - a continual problem I had in 3.x (and sometimes A97) is the language settings differences between Win machines and OS/2 Warp. A message along the lines of "... can't open dbf because a user has it open in another language ..." often prevented concurrent access. Even when just one person opened the app (without another user in there) Approach would rebuild the indexes for each field as the first new record was entered. Thereafter it worked ok for that user in that session, but if the next user had different language settings (ie likely using the other operating system) then the indexes would rebuild again.
• tabbing - at times I have developed on Win and then found that for OS/2 users their tab key will not move them between fields. I thought it was related to a setting in App which treated Enter as tab, but could not get it to work that way. The only way I solved this was to rebuild the offending forms bit by bit. That worked ok - my conclusion was that a form edited/saved many times was too hard for os/2
• drop down lists - this one I have not solved ... sometimes standard Windows functions like typedown do not work on OS/2 machines e.g. you have the user pick from a list of names and expert them to type T to go to the first one on the list. This is a problem for users scrolling through long lists of items.
• screen (colours?) - some apps I have done look fine on my Win machine but when I open them up on OS/2, elements of the form are "not there" e.g. short lines of text, or the form label within a text box. Also have noticed that on os/2 some report forms have no column headings, but they print ok. I have never solved this, but perhaps using a narrow range of colours (e.g. the Approach equivalent of browser-safe palette?) might work better.
• progress bar - when doing large sorts, exports/imports etc I notice that on OS/2 the progress bar looks slightly different. Not a major issue, but some discerning users may ask why it looks different.
• macro pause - most of my report macros use the sequence Find All>run named find >Find again and pause for imput>change view to the report or chart. Sometimes on os/2 the find again and pause for input does not occur, which prevents the user from altering the find criteria if they want to. Note that I use macros, not scripts, so perhaps scripts may work better.