PowerCOBOL provides you with a main application development facility, the Project Manager, to create and manage your development projects.
Figure 1.1 The PowerCOBOL Project Manager
The Project Manager includes wizards to automatically generate application templates, whenever you choose to create a new project.
PowerCOBOL also includes a sophisticated GUI form (window) painter and editor (the Form Editor) to simplify the development of the graphical user interface.
Figure 1.2 The PowerCOBOL GUI Form Editor
Graphical controls are easily dragged and dropped from the Toolbox palette onto a form (window). Event procedures may be developed for any application control event, and PowerCOBOL handles the management of the application code.
Components available directly from the Toolbox palette include:
- CheckBox control
- ComboBox control
- CommandButton control
- GroupBox control
- ListBox control
- OptionButton control
- ScrollBar control
- StaticText control
- TextBox control
- Frame Control
- ListView control
- ProgressIndicator control
- Slider control
- TreeView control
- Tab control
- Toolbar Control
- DriveList control
- FileList control
- FolderList control
- Timer control
- Shape control
- Graph control
- Table control
- Animation control
- Image control
- MCI (Media Control Interface) control
- DB (Database) Access control
- DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) control
- Excel Connection control
- Print control
- Label control
- Edit control
- ADO Data Control
- Microsoft Transaction Server Support Control - (must be added to the Toolbox palette)
Adding Controls to the Toolbox Palette
In addition to the controls provided in the Toolbox palette, you may insert additional custom controls such as the Fujitsu PowerCOBOL Microsoft Transaction Server Support controls or external controls created in other development environments such as Microsoft's Visual Basic.
You access these other controls by selecting Custom Controls from the Tools menu in the Form Editor. When you select this option, PowerCOBOL will scan your current system and find all registered custom controls and then dynamically build a list for you to select from.
Figure 1.3 The Custom Controls dialog box
