On-Screen Keyboard Template 6.3

Introduction
On-Screen Keyboard Template  for Clarion 5~5.5~6.3 ABC/Legacy. White box template to virtually in no time enable Windows' on-screen keyboard (osk.exe) in all prompts of your application. You can see screenshot on the right of this text.

So if you want to build touch-screen application or just let your customers do everything with mouse, you should not look any further.

To test it, please download the demo or just run osk from the Start->Run
On-Screen Keyboard template is just a wrapper for Windows On-Screen Keyboard. 
So if you want to quickly decide whether this template is  going to work for you, please
launch the on-screen keyboard on top of your application. Usually it can be found here:
Start - Programs - Accessories - Accessibility - On-Screen Keyboard.
Or, if you are "DOS-kind-a-guy", just run osk from Start - Run:
The template job is to enable this keyboard in all application procedures 
in a matter of seconds. We do not want to spoil it for you so just play
with all those keyboard settings to see what it can do.
Those are just 2 possible views:
Main advantages:
  • Speed with that On-Screen Keyboard can be
    incorporated into you application
  • Option to customize it on procedure level
  • Option to globally enable/disable this feature at run-rime
  • As all vivid templates, this one is open box template that does not require
    any changes to native (or any other) Clarion templates.
    It is one of our taboos!
  • Can be used to launch any executable on any Alert Key event
Installation
Run the installation wizard. It will guide you through a few simple steps. That is it.
IMPORTANT: If you are using Clarion 5 or 5.5, after selecting Clarion5 or C55 directory wizard
will offer you to install it into C:\Clarion5\Clarion6 or C:\C55\Clarion6 directory respectively. 
So do not forget to get rid of last \Clarion6. But even if you do - it is not a problem.
Just uninstall template and run installation once again.
To start using template you have to manually register it.
Here is instruction: Open Clarion (no application must be open). 
Go to menu Setup -> Template Registry ->Register. Select new 
On-Screen template: onscreen.tpl and then hit Open button
 View animated reminder on how to do that - Registering Template
(built with our JAVA Animated Help Builder).

Using Template

Template usage is dead straightforward.
1. Open Global -> Extensions and insert On-Screen Keyboard Global template.
That is about it! So if you happy with default template settings:
that is all you have to do. By default the osk program is called and it happens on
double-click (double-touch) event at any prompt. Template generates true global flag
OSK:NoKeyboard (visible in all DLLs of multi-dll application), so you can use it to 
enable/disable template functionality at run-time. Please bear in mind that, as soon as
you Ok this global extension, template broadcasts those default settings to all application
procedures. So to change global defaults after this you have to delete this global
extension and insert it once again with new defaults. For example you might
want to reset default Alert Key to F2 or any other key.
It is important to understand that you should not change anything at the procedure
level if you want to use global settings thought-out entire application of yours.
So we provide those prompts just in case you decide to do something really special.
Say make one procedure to launch keyboard on right-click. Or call some
other executable on an Alert event in all procedure prompts. We have made one Demo
procedure to call Windows' calculator (calc) just for the sake of exercise. You can find
Demo in \Clarion*\Examples\Onscreen\
So you might want to have a look at how template is supposed to be used.
But template usage is so simple that you will hardly need it.
This is the first version of template (6.3 stands for C6.3 compatible). 
So we will definitely improve it. In particular we would like to know
what other jobs you have found for that template.
So all your comments and/or suggestions are welcome: feedback

 

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