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Q57355: Colored Buttons/Scroll Bars in BASIC 7.00 UI Toolbox

Article: Q57355
Product(s): See article
Version(s): 7.00   | 7.00
Operating System(s): MS-DOS | OS/2
Keyword(s): ENDUSER | SR# S891207-109 | mspl13_basic
Last Modified: 14-JAN-1990

The User Interface (UI) Toolbox supplied with Microsoft BASIC
Professional Development System (PDS) Version 7.00 for MS-DOS and MS
OS/2 allows you to display scroll bars in windows. However, it has no
facility for specifying foreground and background colors for them and
always uses white and black, respectively. This limitation can be
removed by modifying two COLOR statements in the ButtonShow procedure
of the WINDOW.BAS toolbox file and adding a COMMON SHARED statement to
the module-level code of that same file.

The ButtonShow procedure of the WINDOW.BAS toolbox file is called when
a button (which includes scroll bars) is to be displayed in a window.
As written, the ButtonShow procedure does not allow regular buttons to
have a different color than the window text and scroll bars are
limited to a white foreground and black background.

The colors of regular buttons can be specified through the use of the
WindowColor procedure, which changes the colors used for window text.
The colors used for window text are the same as those used for
buttons.

The COLOR statement used to color scroll bars is as follows:

   COLOR 0,7

There are two of these COLOR statements in the ButtonShow procedure,
one for horizontal scroll bars and one for vertical scroll bars. Both
of them need to be changed to the following statement:

   COLOR ScrollBarForeground%, ScrollBarBackground%

Here ScrollBarForeground and ScrollBarBackground are sample names for
integer variables and may be differently named. However, they must be
unique throughout the entire program because they will be COMMON
SHARED between the module opening a button and the WINDOW.BAS module.
Therefore, at the module-level code of both of those modules, insert
the following statements:

   COMMON SHARED /ScrollBarColors/ ScrollBarForeground%
   COMMON SHARED /ScrollBarColors/ ScrollBarBackground%

Here ScrollBarColors is an sample name for a named COMMON block and
may be different. However, the name of the COMMON block must be the
same in both modules and the data types of the variables must be
integer. To prevent confusion, the same names used in the COLOR
statements should be used in the COMMON SHARED statements.

After the above changes have been made, you can specify what the
foreground and background colors of each scroll bar will be by
assigning color numbers to the variables in the named COMMON block.
The variables do not need to be passed to the ButtonShow procedure
because they are COMMON SHARED with the WINDOW.BAS module. The COLOR
statement will always have access to them.

Code Example
------------

The following code fragment is an example of specifying colors for a
scroll bar:

'The following COMMON SHARED statements would also appear in the
'module-level code of the WINDOW.BAS module.

COMMON SHARED /ScrollBarColors/ ScrollBarForeground%
COMMON SHARED /ScrollBarColors/ ScrollBarBackground%

ScrollBarForeground% = 14   'yellow foreground.
ScrollBarBackground% = 1    'blue background.

'The ButtonOpen procedure will call the ButtonShow procedure,
'which will use the values in ScrollBarForeground% and
'ScrollBarBackground% to COLOR the scroll bar.

CALL ButtonOpen (1, 1, "", 10, 30, 20, 30, 6)

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