Interactive Documents

[Interactive Edition only]

This section describes the methods and properties related to Interactive Documents and Objects.

Using Interactive Objects - which we call in the following Controls, by analogy to the Windows Operating System terminology - you can design document templates which can be filled out electronically by end users with the keyboard and mouse in the preview.

The VPE Interactive Edition introduces the following Controls in the form of additional objects:

•Interactive FormField Control
The same as a FormField (see “FormFields”), enhanced with the capabilities of being editable

•Interactive Text Control
This pure text edit control with the capability of being multi-line editable and freely selectable text justification (left, right, centered, justified).
The multi-line edit capability is limited to the visual area of the control, i.e. it is not possible to attach a scrollbar to an Interactive Text Control, so that more text can be entered, than can be visualized (and therefore couldn't be printed).

•Checkbox Control
A box with a checkmark. The state of the checkbox can be "checked" or "unchecked". For example the attribute "Is Hungry" can be true or false and therefore can be represented very well with a checkbox.

•Radiobutton Control
This is a group of checkboxes which are related to each other. Only one button within its group can be checked, all other buttons are automatically unchecked.
Therefore the name: as with a radio, only one station can be received at a time.
For example, if for the attribute "Most Preferred Food" the options "Meat", "Fish" and "Salad" were possible, each item could be represented as a single Radiobutton within a group. While each Radiobutton is a checkbox with the state "checked" or "unchecked", you assign during creation each button a unique integer value within its group, in order to identify the state of the whole group (see below for a further explanation).

•Radiobutton Group Control
This is a logical object, i.e. it is not visible, but it is required as the Group Object for the Radiobuttons within the group. The Radiobutton Group Object communicates automatically with each contained Radiobutton: if a button is checked, the button informs the Group Object that its state did change. The Group Object will then inform the button which was checked before that its state needs to be changed to "unchecked".
The Radiobutton Group also holds the value of the whole Group, for example, if the assigned unique values for the Radiobuttons are "Meat = 1", "Fish = 2" and "Salad = 3", and the Radiobutton "Fish" is currently selected, the Group's value is "2".
Your application always communicates with the Radiobutton Group, not with any contained Radiobutton, i.e. you read the current value of the Group by reading the value of the Group Object (in the above example it is the value "2") and if you want to change the state of the group, you change the value of the Radiobutton Group Object also.
For example, if you set the value of the Group = 3, then the Radiobutton "Fish" becomes automatically "unchecked" and the Radiobutton "Salad" becomes checked.
If you assign a value to a group, which is not defined by any Radiobutton, no Radiobutton is selected, i.e. the visual state of the group is undefined. This feature can be used to reflect NULL values, for example from databases.