Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.It's extremely rare that I review a module for programmers, but
Mark O'Neill's done such an enthusiastic job
on POPUP that I thought a few words might be in order.
One perennial problem in OPL programming is how to reliably present lists of
choices. Usually the programmer either cobbles something together himself
(labour-intensive and meaning that everybody's code looks and feels completely
different) or else makes do with dCHOICE (meaning that a lot of coding work has
to go into constructing the choice list and also that the eventual dialog is
not responsive to things like system close-down events). POPUP is a well
polished version of the former that's callable with only one extra line
of code in your program, and neatly takes all the effort out of your code and
into its own domain. Here's a screen-shot of my Lifeguide in action, using Mark's routine:
In addition to being responsive to EPOC (and passing the system events back
to the parent code for further handling), POPUP also has the neat facility to
work from standard DATA files, so you can maintain your information in
databases and let POPUP handle how to display them and handle scrolling, user
input etc. For complex databases, Mark sensibly recommends that you build a
temporary one-field file for POPUP to work from (presumably for speed reasons),
but I found that with Lifeguide's fairly small 30 entry databases, POPUP ran
quite fast enough from the original files. You'll just have to experiment!
Suddenly a previously troublesome part of OPL/32 just got quite a bit
easier! POPUP is freeware and is well worth a download for any OPL programmer's
toolkit. I grabbed my copy from Mark's web
site.
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