Re: XForms: Bitmaps and Browser Storage

Steve Lamont (spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 21 Jan 99 11:13:26 PST

# To subscribers of the xforms list from spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) :

> On using a bitmap editor to alter some of your xforms bitmaps,
> e.g. nomail.xbm, I noticed that it was impossible to insert any
> extra colors into them. Is that a built in limitation? Effectively,
> I think, I can only have two colors like black and white or red and
> green. Am I stuck with two colors?

For bitmaps, yes. They are, by definition, two colors -- a foreground
color and a background color. For color, you need to got to Pixmaps.

> Your browsers are very convenient data storage devices. In SQL when
> I do a select I can fill up consecutive browsers with data, but I
> don't really need to display all the browsers which I've been using
> to collect database data-rows. It occurred to me that if I could
> hide the browsers which are collecting data which I don't wish to
> display, I might be able to use them just for storage purposes
> only. Trouble is it appears that hiding a browser renders the
> browser unusable. Is there any way to get around this, i.e. declare
> a browser, somehow make it invisible, and yet continue to be able to
> read data from it?

Hm. I'm not completely sure I understand what you're trying to do but
as far as I can tell XForms doesn't care whether the browser is
visible or invisible when adding or deleting data. If you do
fl_hide_object() any XForms object still should be able to be
manipulated in any appropriate fashion.

Can you be more specific as to what doesn't work?

If you are using a browser merely as a data storage area, you are
probably adding a lot of unnecessary overhead to your application.
You may wish to consider using some more appropriate tool, such as the
Berkeley database library or the GNU database library (a misnomer,
since it really isn't a database, at least in the same way that SQL is
-- it's more of a data storage, management, and retrieval library).
It has support for trees, hash tables, and linear arrays, both in
memory and out of memory (if memory serves [pun intended]).

spl

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