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Arthur van Egmond lives in the Netherlands. He is married but doesn't have any children yet. He works for the government in the department of Social Security and his main job is to keep the client computers up and running. His first experience with OS/2 was with version 2.1. Since then he upgraded to eCS 1.2. He owns or at least has seen nearly all versions.

Welcome back. Thanks for joining me in our tour through creating a database using Lotus Smartsuite. Over the past three installments we have created a few databases.

We started simply enough with the database Genre. You did your homework and you made two other databases, Dvdformat and Dvdextra. In Part 3 we created the database Contacts.

Heavy Lifting

Now it is time for the real work. We are going to create a database Movies. We will not finish this database this time because there simply is too much to be done for one part.

We create the menu which allows us to open all our databases. We can then place just one object on our Desktop to access all our databases.

We are going to create ten forms, two reports, and about 30 macros. A lot of work.

In this article we create the database, the main form, the DVD region screen, the help screen, the print screen, the explanation screen, and adjust the list form.

We will create some of the macros.

Make the Database Movies

So let's start. Create the database and add all the fields as shown in Table 1. Save the database as movies.dbf.

Menu

First we make the menu.

• Select the File menu
• Select New database
• Click OK
• Give this database the name menu.dbf
• Click OK

We won't need any fields in this database because we are only using it to access other databases. However, Approach doesn't allow a database with no fields (I wonder why :-)) so we add just one field.

• Name the field Menu
• Set the size to 1
• Click OK
• Now click Design and get rid of the ugly header and the field

We now know how to create a more interesting header. We also create the rectangle on the left side of the screen. We are not going to use this for all our buttons, only the Exit button and maybe the Help button. Let's just see.

Now change the background to our favorite blue and create the rectangle and header like we have done so many times now. Don't forget to set the margins to 0cm. You can delete the worksheet (select the worksheet, press the right mousebutton, click Delete) because we don't need it in this database. Although we use it in a different way, it is still a database.

Let us make the Exit macro.

• Create a macro with the name Sure! and the command Exit
• Create a macro with the name Nope! and the command View - Menu
• Create a macro with the name Exit

Now create a new form.

• Name this form Alert
• Make it like we have made the Help form. This time title it Alert screen
• Add the following text to this screen:
  Alert! You are about to exit Approach
  Have you saved all your work?
  Perhaps you have left another database open?

  Put two buttons on the alert screen, one for Sure! and one for Nope!. Just for fun, make the text on the Sure! button green and the text on the Nope! button red. :-)

Create a macro with the name Alert and the command View - Alert.

Create a button on the main screen, attach the Alert macro to it, and add the text Exit.

Okay, we have given ourselves a little reminder. I think in this situation it is okay. You can use it more but don't use it too often.

Now let us create some more macros:

All we have to do now is make some decoration in the menu area and create buttons to open the databases.

The Decoration

Draw a rectangle:

Now draw a textbox and type MyDatabases but after each letter hit the [Enter] key. It looks like this.

M
y
D
a
t
a
b
a
s
e
s

Looks pretty cool. :-)

Let's create the buttons. This time I like to use oval buttons. Create an oval shape.

Now copy this button and paste it four times so you have a total of five buttons.

Apply the macros to the corresponding buttons and add a textfield to the button.

To make it nicer let us link the buttons movie - genre, genre - dvdextra, dvdextra - dvdmedia with lines. I have used a line of 2pt width and used the same color as the button color.

Because we have a shadow under the buttons we should also create a shadow under the lines. Use maroon for this line color.

Okay let's create some fancy text for the buttons.

When you position the text over the button it looks like the text is carved in the button. Position the text over the button so it's more or less in the centre. It's a bit difficult to exactly position a square over an oval so move the text around until it looks okay.

My text is on

Create a macro My Menu like we did before. Leave only the Help menu with the About and Help items. Apply this macro on all tabs. Now deselect all the views. Only the main window is left now. Save the file and select View > Browse.

Basically the menu is ready. If required, we can make changes later. You can now test all buttons to see if you can open a database. When finished testing, we continue with the database Movies.

The Movies Forms

As you can see all the fields are present on the main tab. This is a little bit crowded in my opinion. Let's delete some of the fields here. Later we will create new forms for the other fields.

Delete all the fields except Title, Genre, Time, Dvdmedia, Dvdextra, Number of disks, Imdbcode, Film ID, Borrowed To, Storyline, and Cover. Don't worry! Deleting the fields here doesn't remove them from the database.

Okay, that's more like it. Now we can create a few styles. Like I said we will create 11 forms. So maybe it's nice to create a style for this. We simply apply the style to the new form. Now create three styles called Button, Button text and Background.

After you have created and saved your styles select the gray dotted area. Click in the tab styles on background. Now change the page name and the form name to Input. Set all margins to 0cm.

Create the menubar and the header as we did before. Select all fields and adjust the font and font color for data and labels.

Position the fields like this:

Use the following parameters to draw hairlines:

Now add a label to the field with the text Storyline.

Drag the field inside the just created rectangle.

Okay. Our input form is now almost ready, all the fields are in place. :-)

Adjust the Worksheet

Rename the worksheet to List and select our favorite font and colors. All that we have to do now is: Create the forms Dvdregion, Help, Print, and Explanation.

Okay, create four forms and modify them like this.

• Adjust the page name to the form name
• Set all margins to 0 cm
• Set all forms to Show Form as Dialog
• On each form we create a rectangle:

  Table 14. Form Rectangle Dimensions

  W	H	T	L
  10.0	7.0	0.0	0.11

  Use copy and paste to copy the rectangle over all forms.
• Create a header for each form with the title of the form just as we did so many times now: Dvdregionscreen, Helpscreen, Printscreen, Explanationscreen
• Enter a ½ point line under the title.

Dvdregion Screen

On the Dvdregion Screen add this information in a textbox (We also need to add a button Close to it):

0. Playable in all regions. (In this database we use Region Free)
1. United States of America, Canada
2. Greenland, Europe, Egypt, Middle East, Lesotho, Swaziland, South Africa, Japan
3. Southeast Asia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan
4. Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Central America, South America
5. Russia, lands of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, India, Mongolia, Africa
6. China
7. (Reserved for future use)
8. International areas (like airplanes and ships)

Help Screen

On the Help Screen add this information, also use Gill Sans 9 point.

Print Screen

On the Print Screen add the following information. Use Gill Sans 14 point.

The first part is for Print Card (or List) and the second is for the semicolon. I did it this way so the text would line up better. Otherwise depending on the font you either end up with semicolons that are not lined up, or with text that is difficult to read. Therefore I spilt all the text into blocks.

Explanation Screen

On the Explanation Screen enter the following information (use the same settings as the Helpscreen, etc.):

That's All for Today

Okay, I think this is more than enough for now. The macros I've promised to make will have to wait until next time. Hope you enjoyed this part also and hope to see you again next time when we continue with our database.