>>Yes, I did. But what I really need is something like the outlook , which show
>>the order of the column. Also I need that take care about the lenght of the caption's name (of the head) because in my software the user can change it.
>
>vfp7 will take care of the second item, and possibly the first, so eventually there'll be an easy solution. But I can tell you from the way we do things here, any user that can't determine which direction a column is sorted in (ascending/descending) really shouldn't be working here :) Note that Win Explorer doesn't show it, either.
Outlook does (there's a little triangle in the sorted column indicating the direction of sort) but you can get the same sort of functionality by abandoning the VFP grid in favor of a third-party ActiveX control that'll accept icons in columns. it isn't free, and will require3 significantly different programming techniques to be used, but such controls do exist, and some may work in the VFP environment.
If I desperately had to have this exact functionality, I'd probably go to someone like ComponentSource and see if they had something that could do the job, and I'd accept the cost and the fact that I'd have to rewrite every bit of code related to the grid to add this feature - and I'd point out to the cleint that his graphical arrow was probably going to add several thousand dollars to the cost of development, and increase the eventual cost of on-going development as well. It'd be their dollars to spend.
It doesn't matter if you operate as an in-house employee or an outside contractor; whatever pointy-haired boss said it had to work that way would have to decide to spend the money - whether your time is worth anything is their decision, as long as you get paid.
Noone has mentioned the approach I'd take to this problem - get away from the need for the graphic icon entirely. This is actually not difficult - it'd just be a matter of using a font with the necessary up- and down-arrow symbols in them, and then when sort orders changed, it'd be a simple matter of changing the caption of the header to add/remove the appropriate character. And this gets around the sizing issue as well. This now becomes a more reasonable scenario - the cost is now the cost of the necessary font license if you don't have one with the symbols you need already...but then, I'm lazy and don't give a rat's patootie if it does what the user wants but isn't
exactly the graphical appearance they'd like. I'm in favor of letting them decide between fast to implement, easy to maintain and inexpensive to implement, or lots of time spent researching a solution, getting bit down the road for more time if the behavior has to change, and expensive. It's their money, and they're the pointy-haired boss...
BTW, Courier New and Arial both have « » if pointing left and right rather than up and down would work, everything has < >, and Symbol has the graphical arrows you'd need, but not letters and numbers. I'd expect to find mathematical or engineering fonts that had them needed character sets from someone like Adobe pretty easily...
