USING MODULES

As of version 5.0, abcDB now supports code ‘modules’.  What does this mean for you?  It means you can now ‘share’ and ‘re-use’ code! 

Here’s how it works:

Whenever you’re editing a FORM, you can click the FORM properties, and you’ll find 5 properties called Module1,Module2,Module3,Module4,Module5.  Each module can contain up to 32,000 characters of code.  These 5 modules are not specific to the form you’re editing.  They are available to EVERY form in your database.

Let’s look at a very ‘useless’ example.  Perhaps your application will need to test the value of a variable called VALUE and notify you of whether it is equal to 1,2,3, or else give you an error message.  Let’s also assume that you’ll need to perform this test MANY times throughout your code!

Well, rather than duplicating the following lines of code EVERY time you need to run this test, you can instead place this code in one of the modules, and ‘call’ it using the following RUNSUB statement from anywhere else in your application:

RUNSUB(TEST_VALUE)

Notice that for this to work, you need to preface the block of code with the name of the subroutine.  Subroutine names are prefixed with a colon. 

Whenever you want the subroutine to ‘return’ control to the calling code, you can use the RETURN() statement.

:TEST_VALUE
TEST(<!value!>//=//1)
  MESSAGE(“one”//”one”)
  RETURN()
ENDTEST()

TEST(<!value!>//=//2)
  MESSAGE(“two”//”two”)
  RETURN()
ENDTEST()

TEST(<!value!>//=//3)
  MESSAGE(“three”//”three”)
  RETURN()
ENDTEST()

MESSAGE(“You did not enter a valid value!”//”ERROR”)
RETURN()

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