Hey Tracy!

This whole thing started because a client of mine is working on a project and somehow the ER diagram got to be kept in MS Access (it started with about a dozen tables, and now it's up to around 50).

The roll of being the librarian in this project crept up on me, so I'm the one in charge of printing out the ER diagram and since it doesn't fit entirely into a 1024x768 access window (from which I capture screen shots), I started toying with the possibility of making that window really large in order to capture it entirely in a single shot (as opposed to having to tile images in a graphics application). I know, we should've used xCase, visual UML, visio, or another tool more suitable for the task, but before we knew it we had a diagram that looked like a spider-web with 50 tables caught in it like flies, so starting over wasn't something either of us was anxious to do. So we all tacitly agreed that having to tile images in a graphics app once a week wasn't such a terrible thing.

If you have two monitors and feel like experimenting, just see if you can stretch an application's window to fill both monitors (unmaximize it and then start stretching the borders).

So in the end, considering how complicated it seems to be, this saga is unlikely to yield anything trully useful, but rather quench my curiosity about whether something like this would be possible.

Thanks to you and all that offered their ideas!!!

Alex

>Hi Alex,
>
>I extend my desktop to a 2nd monitor at times using nView (came with my video card). I work daily with two monitors (couldn't stand to use only one after having the luxury of using two for development). Do you have specific code you want to test?
>
>Tracy
>
>>Hi Jim,
>>
>>That's the video driver doing the trick. Depending on who makes the video card, this functionality may or may not be available.
>>
>>The best that my laptop can do towards this is allow me to extend the desktop into a secondary monitor - I haven't had the chance to see how much I can enlarge a window when a secondary monitor is connected, though.
>>
>>Have fun!
>>
>>Alex
>>
>>
>>>Hi Alex,
>>>
>>>It's interesting though (to me at least) that older laptops that I've seen can 'scroll' the Windows desktop. I've seen laptops with a 'base' resolution of 800x600 display a 1024x768 window by allowing moving the mouse beyond the edge, causing the hidden part to be visible.
>>>I has thought this was a OS 'service' but I guess it's a hardware service.
>>>
>>>cheers
>>>
>>>>>Alex,
>>>>>
>>>>>>Looks like vfp ignores the message from the operating system regarding it's window being constrained by the size of the desktop.
>>>>>
>>>>>I don't think it's working like you think.
>>>>>
>>>>>I think Access is doing the equivalent of a sysmetric(1)/(2) call and Access itself is keeping you from making the window too big. As you can see the O/S doesn't care how big a window is.
>>>>
>>>>Hi David,
>>>>
>>>>I did some digging in newsgroups-land while I was trying to do this (make a window larger than the desktop), and didn't come accross the technical answer again until now that I searched again to reply to you (sorry for the delay). Here's what I had found as the reason why windows (the OS) prevents applications from growing beyond the size (not the boundaries) of the desktop:
>>>>
>>>>----Begining of newsgroups quote:
>>>>>Can somebody tell me why the following code doesn't produce a 1000 x 1000
>>>>>pixels window (see the parameters in function CreateWindow(...)), but a 800
>>>>>x 600 window (this is the size of my desktop)?
>>>>
>>>>I feel tempted to point out the obvious sillieness of creating a window
>>>>larger than the screen. Ah well. What you will need to do is handle the
>>>>WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING message. This is typically handled by DefWindowProc
>>>>that sends a WM_GETMINMAXINFO message that retrieves the largest and
>>>>smallest dimensions an overlapped window can be. Handle it yourslef to
>>>>prevent it clipping the windwo size to the desktop size.
>>>>
>>>>-----End of newsgroups quote.
>>>>
>>>>I don't think that vfp or the api offers an easy way to intercept the above messages. This is probably yet another thing that vfp does its own [and unstandard] way.
>>>>
>>>>Thanks for trying though!
>>>>
>>>>Alex