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One popular feature that has appeared on the Windows platform is the wizard. Wizard's purpose in life is to guide you through a specific task, often giving you useful text or graphic hints along the way. Wizards are used for almost any type of task, from software installs to modem configurations and other complex tasks. The general format is usually a series of dialog boxes with one or more buttons at the bottom of the window for navigation.
Developer/2000 includes a wizard component that simplifies creating wizards within your own application. Unfortunately, this component isn't really an object, but a collection of parts that have been packaged together as a starting point.
Let's say you're working for a stockbroker firm that handles daily trading. You've built them a form that shows their stock histories, as we've done in Figure A. They have now asked you for the ability to easily add new stocks to their tracking system. You decide to build a wizard interface so that the stockbrokers can have an accurate and easy way to enter and track new stocks.
The first task we must accomplish is attaching the wizard library to our stock trading form. This file is called WIZARD.PLL and can be found in
This library contains one function and two procedures that we'll use to manipulate our wizard, as summarized in Table
A. The code is actually fairly simple and could be improved upon if needed.
We now need to pull the wizard components into our form. In the same directory that you found the wizard library, now open the standards object library (stndrd20.olb). You can then double-click on the Components tab and drag the WIZARD component onto the object group tree item within your form. Forms will ask you whether you want to copy or subclass this object. For now, let's make a copy, in case we need to customize anything within the wizard object group.
Four new items will appear within your form after you complete the copy of the wizard object group. You should now see a WIZ_BAR block, which...