B-2-B Part II, Active Error Handling

If you are running a business, you're going to need business software. You may need highly specialized work flow management tools, or simply a word processor and an accounting package. In either case, you'll need to purchase licenses and updates for these programs for each of your employees, and in addition, pay for technical support of the software.

Business software needs are varied, and yours requirements are specific to your company. Even if you are able to find the best software to fit your company's business needs, the software is likely to be expensive, and more importantly, unable to do exactly what you need it to do. How often have you bought off-the-shelf software, got it back to the office, just to find out that it only meets 65% of your needs? This shouldn't really come as a surprise: The programmers who create commercially available business software do not know your company nor your special requirements. By far the best solution is to create your company's business software yourself. But do you have the resources? Whereas large companies have their own programming departments, up until now, smaller business simply did not have the budget to take their software development into their own hands. This is however changing: New tools are becoming available which make it possible for developers to create totally customized business applications based on specific company needs.

So what do you need to create these "better business applications" in a cost-effective way, thus allowing your company to avoid all of the problems mentioned above? Simply squeeze the last bit of power out of TX Text Control. Are you really using TX Text Control to its full extent? Just think of the possibilities - look at what other people have created with our software.

How can you improve YOUR software with TX? Don't just use the simple but complete word processing features that TX offers, get down to the nitty-gritty - drag your words into place, with TX's drag&drop capabilities. Add headers and footers to your document. Connect your documents to your customer database. Produce quotations on-the-fly and send them to your customers. Just hit the fax button to fax the document, or the e-mail button to e-mail your offer to your customers. What could be simpler? Have a look again at our sample B-2-B app. This is a demo of the software all of us here at The Imaging Source use on a day-to-day basis.

The multitalented TX Text Control saves us time and at the same time, we are able to impress our customers with the speed and efficiently with which we can send out our quotations, orders and invoices. To give you some idea how our system works, consider this typical scenario: A customer calls us wanting to place an order for an image processing system, but he has no idea how to what he needs. He has a problem and we must offer a solution. Towards the end of a completely free consolation with one of our senior specialists, the customer receives, on his fax machine (or in his Inbox), a quotation for all the components that he is currently discussing. Even before the consultation has come to an end, the quotation has been sent. How is that for efficiency? Learn more about The Imaging Source Office Suite:

Can your business do the same? When you plan your next business software purchase, don't buy an off-the-shelf product that only meets a small percentage of your needs, build your own company specific system. Make your life easier, use TX Text Control.

TX Top Tip: Dealing with databases

This week we are dealing with databases. TX Text Control can be used in bound mode in VB (Delphi doesn't provide this feature), but this is not always the way to go. For example: You want to built an application that has a mail merge feature, but you do not want TX Text Control to replace the entire contents of the document with a field from a database. You need to replace only a certain piece of text or a marked text field with text from a database. This weeks Tip of the week shows how to do that.

Private Sub GetRecord()
    Dim ba() As Byte, s As String

    If IsNull(rs("RTF")) Then
        TXTextControl1 = ""
        TXTextControl2 = ""
    Else
        ' Load RTF data and convert it to a byte array
        s = rs("RTF")
        ba = StrConv(s, vbFromUnicode)
        ' Display RTF data in Text Control 1
        TXTextControl1.LoadFromMemory ba, 5, False
        TXTextControl1.Refresh
        ' Display RTF source code in Text Control 2
        TXTextControl2.Text = s
    End If
End Sub

'
' PutRecord
'
' Save contents of Text Control to database
'
Private Sub PutRecord()
    Dim ba() As Byte, s As String

    ba = TXTextControl1.SaveToMemory(5, 0)
    s = StrConv(ba, vbUnicode)

    rs.Edit
    rs("RTF") = s
    rs.Update
End Sub

The two methods above are from the DataAccess sample, which you can download from our FTP server. The variable rs is a usual VB RecordSet. This example uses RTF rather than the internal TX format. GetRecord reads a field from the database and displays it in a text control. First the field 'RTF' is read into a string. Then StrConv is used to convert the string to a byte array (note the UniCode support) and then the byte array is loaded into the TX using LoadFromMemory. If you didn't want to replace the entire contents of the TX with the text from the database you simply have to specify 'True' for the last parameter. Then only the current selection is replaced. PutRecord works just the other way round and uses to SaveToMemory and StrConv to complete the task.

Many of the TX Sample Applications use a very similar technique to grab their data from a database (just like the examples to which the links above lead) and insert it into their TX Text Control document.

I take it you have not forgotton that you can get your own TX Text Control application on our sample page. This will give you completly free advertising. Interested?

Active Error Handling for Recovery...
because a Better "Message Box" Just Isn't Enough!

Foundation's ActiveError Technology can help you develop robust software for today's tiered, distributed and internet world. Using Foundation, your applications and components have the unique ability to actually recover from errors and exceptions and so remain stable and reentrant, as if the error never even happened! With Foundation you get the ultimate error handling solution which takes an active role in managing the consequences of all errors, rather than passively catching and logging diagnostics. And with Foundation's advanced StackSpy technology you get that vitally important Call Stack information for Free!.. because, unlike brute force techniques, StackSpy doesn't need those performance slugging trace calls! More..?

Foundation will provide you with a migration path to Structured Exception Handling in VB7.

Building Business Apps Was Hard, Then You Discovered TX Text Control

TX Top Tip: Dealing with databases

Active Error Handling for Recovery... because a Better "Message Box" Just Isn't Enough!

Active Error Handling for Recovery...
because a Better "Message Box" Just Isn't Enough!