AppInit performs a lot of housekeeping so you don't have to. Many of the tasks are small, like adding your application icon to every window instead of the default Clarion Icon. But some are major, such as stamping your exe or dll with version information while automatically incrementing a build number.
The Application Initialization template set currently supports Clarion 4.0 through Clarion 6.0, Legacy and ABC. App Init fully supports Multi DLL applications. Support for Multi DLL apps includes version level checking and Class export control.
Where do I get it?
Setup_AppInit_2_2.exe
(811k)
Requires Password
Demo (1.7m)
| Main Screen | |
| AppInit is a Global Extension Template that stamps version information directly into your application. The information can be displayed in a splash screen, an about box, and will be visible on the properties tab of your exe or dll file in the Explorer properties dialog. |
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| Company Information | |
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The company information prompt tab is where you specify the contact information that will be added to your application. |
| Version Information | |
| Version information is maintained here. The build number is automatically incremented at each build of your application. This can be reset at any time by entering a new value in the Build Number prompt. The build date format can be set to either current or changed. Clarion stores the date the application was last changed in the app file. If you open an application, don't make any changes, do a make, and look at the results, you will find the date reflects the last date changes were actually saved in the application. This option allows you to specify which type of date stamping you want for your build... last change date or todays compile date. |
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| Copyright Information | |
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You can specify a trademark string to display, who holds the actual copyright on the application (maybe different than the company?) and what rights will be displayed in the copyright string. There are three valid formats for a copyright date display string, a date range, the date the work was originally created, or todays date. You have the option of selecting the style that suits you best. If you leave the "Use Internal Date" box checked, AppInit will use the date stamp in the app file to determine the date the work was created and todays date to determine the copyright year. Unchecking this box allows you to overwrite the default values. |
| String Translation | |
| The prompt strings on the about screen and Splash screen are generated at make time. You can use this prompt screen to change the prompts into whatever language you desire. Variables are not supported yet, but will be in an upcoming version. |
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| Set Application Properties |
You have the option of taking control over the way your application behaves. You can set an icon to be used on all windows, even those that don't have icons assigned. By default, Clarion will use the standard Clarion application icon unless you specify otherwise. Here you can specify otherwise.You can also specify whether or not to write the version information into a resource file to be included in your application. Version stamping can only be done on 32 bit applications. You can specify whether you want the version number to be appended to your application name in the program caption bar. You can specify if you only want one instance of the application to execute at a time. If you select this option, when a user attempts to start a second copy of the application, the second instance will see the first instance and tell Windows to make it active. Then the second instance exits without opening a window. The effect is that an attempt to start a second instance will simply result in the first instance being made active. Finally, you can specify that your application will obey a windows shutdown request. Standard Clarion behavior is to ignore the user request to shutdown windows. This is probably a desired behavior for many database applications, but can get in the way of unattended routines. This option will create a subclass procedure that watches for the windows shutdown request and if it gets one, it will shut your application down gracefully by posting an EVENT:CloseDown. |
| Multi DLL Support | |
| If you have created a Multi DLL application, you can have your exe validate the version number of the individual DLL components. In the main (exe) application simply add the dll's you wish to check, and specify a minimum version level. When the About screen is displayed, there will be a list of DLL's with any failures highlighted in red. |
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| About Screen | |
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You can specify the image to be displayed on the about screen. You can also specify whether an MDI or SDI about screen is generated. |
| Splash Screen | |
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You can choose whether you want to display the splash screen from the template side, or you can use the control template that is provided to supply your user with a checkbox that will turn the splash screen on or off. You can also set the number of seconds for the splash screen to display. The splash screen background can be either a single image, 520x290 pixels in size, or a tiled image. |
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| Splash Suppression | |
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If you decide to give your user control over splash screen generation, you can specify an ini file and section here to be checked before the splash screen displays. A control template is provided that will toggle the ini file setting for you. Just place the control template on a "preferences" screen and point to the settings you place here, and the user will have complete control! |
| Definable Display Font Colors | |
| Different images will require different colors for the information display. Here you can specify the color of the strings used by the Splash screen procedure. |
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| Results... |
| The Application Splash Screen |
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The Application About Screen |
| The "Explorer" version information dialog |
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| Sylkie Home Page | Contact: Richard Rogers |