The Hidden Treasure of Action Scripting in Alpha Five Version 7

In this tutorial you will discover how you will be able to substantially increase your productivity with Alpha Five Version 7 by letting its unique Action Scripting tool’s write editable code for you!

Presented by Frances Peake http://www.proctorandpeake.com/about_us.htm

Introduction

Many Alpha Five users overlook Action Scripting and the Xdialog Genie, assuming that they are not powerful enough or are too restrictive. This is simply not the case! In this tutorial you will discover how you can save a huge amount of time and build your Xbasic and Xdialog skills by letting the Action Script genies write your code. Then with a few simple steps, you will be able to modify your code and enhance it to meet virtually any complex requirement.

How I became an Xbasic programmer

I never considered myself to be a programmer, yet I have built a 15-year career developing database applications with Alpha Five. Business people are attracted to Alpha Five because it was designed for them, not for programmers. With the Enhanced Action Scripting that comes with Alpha Five Version 7 , you really can solve most database challenges without writing code.

I respect and admire those in the Alpha developer community who, when faced with a database challenge, reach for Xbasic first. They are adept at Xbasic programming. They prefer it and often recommend it over using Action Scripting, Genies, Saved Operations and Web Components. Ironically, these powerful-but-easy-to-use tools are exactly what make Alpha Five so much more appealing than its competitors!

As a non-programmer, I reach for Action Scripting and the other “non-programmer” tools first. Nevertheless in recent years I have met with some challenges that required me to learn more and more Xbasic. I have come to appreciate the higher degree of control and efficiency that it can provide.

These days I create a lot of hybrid scripts – part Action Scripting and part Xbasic. I often start in Action Scripting and then convert some of the actions to Xbasic for further customization. (The same can be accomplished with Operations by defining them in the Control Panel and converting them to Xbasic.) Studying the code that Action Scripting generates is a great way to learn Xbasic!

What you will learn from this tutorial

• Highlights from the Xdialog Action Script genie
• When to convert Action Scripts to Xbasic
• How to integrate Action Scripting and Xbasic

The following examples are contained in Alpha Five v7 database, which can be downloaded from http://www.proctorandpeake.com/a5conf/A5Conf2006ActionScripting.zip

The Complete tutorial is in PDF format and is included in the zip file.

More Information on Alpha Five v7 is available at http://www.alphasoftware.com/products/a5v7/highlights.asp

The Alpha Store is at http://www.alphasoftware.com/shop/ or email sales@alphasoftware.com.

If you found this tutorial helpful and would like to see more, or if you would like to author a tutorial, please send an email to marketing@alphasoftware.com.