Thanks Terry.
I agree.


>>>There are many VFP developers that have been advising against "grids" for years. I count myself among them. In your apps - maybe it's 85% - but in mine it's almost zero!
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>>Hi Terry.
>>Just for my knowledge. What is wrong with using grids?
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>They are the reason VFP has had such a bad reputation. Grids are like browse windows - they are a good tool for non-programmers to do data analysis or swap data in and out of office applications. They are a terrible data entry service. They do not allow for higharchial representations.
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>When we charge a client thousands of dollars for delivery of a grid based VFP program - we are denying ourselves the challenge of developing a "first rate" data service - and we are ripping them off. They could have done the same thing with excel and not paid us a penny. And that's the way they feel after we deliver a form with a page object full of grids. They feel like they paid for a low end mimic of an excel application.
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>Take for example an invoice entry service. There is more than one file involved in that. The customer file, the inventory and the invoicing files. Maybe tax schedules and handling fees would also be required. The only way to accomodate with a one file grid is to get sloppy and replicate data.
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>There's nothing wrong with them when they are needed. They may be best as a navigator - ie click a row and push the fields to to textboxes somewhere else on the form. One issue with grids is that the slider is snap-to. With a listview, the sliders are cached. Also with grids, to sort on a column requires an index or tag associated with the datasource. With listview, the data is cached (in memory), and we can use the built-in cache-sort - so we don't need to consume resources assuring that the colums(as we do in grids) have an index.
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>List objects are navigators. Spread sheets are grids. Grids should not be used for data entry. I am not alone. Boothe has written against grids also.
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>But the biggest issue with grids is that prospects don't like them. Grids, because of the difficulty in implementing constraints or the difficulty with methods means that instead of programatic control - we usually have to give the user a list of rules. If the user wanted a spreadsheet, they would have done it with excel themselves. In fact, when prospects have described what they beleive is the typical foxpro app they have described spread sheets.
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>Good software implies intuitive constraints - not a big "how to" or "don't do" list. Grids consume resources. Data entry is a one-record event spread over many tables. So they're wastful too!
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>I would look at how guys like Turbotax or QuickBooks for designing order entry engines - not Excel.
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>My conclusion is that prospects have asked for a data management solution have actually receive what amounts to something that is not much more than a digital "Big Chief" tablet and pencil - a grid! I beleive that all the complaints we have heard about foxpro are due to the fact that many of us (or some interlopers with a "I am a computer consultant" business card) have left a bad taste in the mouth of our market by billing them for a spread sheet that is not even as usable as Excel!
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>There maybe support for this reasoning. VB programmers did not have grids - they had listview - and list view - for the reasons I mentioned above is more intuitive and much sexier than a grid. We're ripping off our patrons when we limit our imagination and effort to a grid. They could do that themselves in VFP by just typing "browse" in the command window. And they could do it much cheaper than the rates we charge.!
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>Don't get me started!:)