Disabled controls sometimes don’t look disabled? (Xe)

[Remo Williams]

Hi people,

Here’s a problem I’ve been having over here with a custom application I’m creating for a customer of ours.

I haven’t been able to find anything on it on the KG and JDElist, and none of my colleagues have ever experienced this phenomenon they said. Yet I’ve witnessed this effect at one or two other customer sites as well.

So I really hope someone here can help me out – or even just the mere acknowledgement that one of you has also witnessed this effect.

Here goes:

I use system functions Disable Control/Enable Control to disable/enable pushbuttons on a header detail form. In the event “Button clicked” of some of the pushbuttons, I call system function Disable Control to disable some of the other pushbuttons. Usually all is fine: When I press the button, the other buttons are disabled and they get the disabled “look” (The text labels become fuzzy, indicating that the buttons are disabled). But sometimes when I start my application, and press the button, the buttons that should become disabled, do NOT get the disabled look (Text labels do not become fuzzy; The buttons look like they are enabled). The buttons ARE disabled though (I cannot click them).

It seems to happen at random. I haven’t been able to figure out how to reproduce it. Restarting OneWorld usually gets rid of this effect. But of course this is not an option as far as the customer is concerned (Understandebly).

Now usually I wouldn’t mind this effect, because usually the important reasom to disable a control is to prevent the user from being able to click on it, but for this particular application, it is important that the user gets the visual feedback of buttons being disabled.

I even logged a call the other day with Peoplesoft, but of no avail: The tech analyst I spoke to checked and said it had never been reported before. Maybe due to customer setup.. try upgrading to the latest service pack… faulty ER design … were some of the suggestions he came up with, none of which I think is the cause.

Customer is running Xe SP23_L1 on W2000 fat clients (non-web).

Thanx in advance for anything you can say on this post. Like I said: I’ve witnessed this effect at 1 or 2 other customers’ sites as well, and not only with pushbutton controls. I’ve seen it happen to form exits and row exits as well.

 

[peterbruce]

Remo,

I have seen some strange intermittant things on fat clients, but not the one you describe. The last one was the OneWorld Icon (at the bottom right of the window) turning black in an application. Your problem sounds a little like this. As this problem only ever happend on one machine and it's nature was similar to system resource problems on the fat client, we replace the machine and we haven't had the problem recur. I suspected there was an intermittant hardware problem on the video card or system memory, but could never prove it one way or the other. The fat client was not a minimum spec machine either, so that would not have been an issue.

I hope my comments can help. All the best for a resolution for the problem.

 

[Remo Williams]

Hi Peter, thanx for your comments. Yeah, if it was just one machine, then my problem would be solved. But this problem is on more machines than one. I had a PY update package deployed on the customer's test machine the other day, and it had the same problem. I'm gonna wait for a full pack. If that doesn't change things and I don't get any useful tips here on jde-list, I'll have to come up with a different solution (one that doesn't involve sys functions Enable/Disable Control).