Hello to everybody
need your help to solve a couple of problems we are currently having.
We have a financial application developped under Oracle Application
11i and, for an unknown reason, there are some basic functions that
work only on few PCs.
The two function are :

- cut and paste
it is not possible to cut characters from a windows application and
paste them into an input text box in Oracle. Have tried both Ctrl-V
and mouse right click/etc... but no paste at all. Of course also the
opposite doesn't work (cut in Oracle, paste in another Win
application)

- print
On the toolbar there is a printer icon that should print the image
of the form currently opened. Unfortunately also this option works
only on few PCs. When somebody click on the icon nothing happens and
users do not rcv the standard windows where you can choose the
printer.

Any idea about the cause of a/m problems ?
What have noted till now is that :
- the two problems go together.
- have not seen any relation between a/m problems and the software
installed. PCs are similar but not the same (different versions of
Win, service packs, version of Office, some PCs now have started using
Office Outlook,

Pls let me know

Many many thanks in advance

Regards

v_verno wrote:

Windows DLLs.

--
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/e...ad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/e...oa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan@x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)

v_verno <v_verno (AT) tin (DOT) it> wrote i

Cut-and-paste is a *standard* Windows feature for Windows controls. If
the application is using a standard Windows control, cut-and-paste
*will* work (unless disabled by the app for things like a password
edit box).

When it does not work, it implies one of two things. It is either
disabled by the application as I've just mentioned. Or it is *not* a
standard Windows control (e.g. a custom developed control or a control
that has been subclassed without correctly supporting copy-and-paste
methods).

Oh yeah - add 3rd possibility. Security/access control. Copy-and-paste
uses the Windows Clipboard feature. It is possible that a Virtual
Machine (VM) or application is being run (or is configured) in such a
way that it is prevented from successfully using the Clipboard
methods. VM's also very often implement their own clipboard system
that is local within that VM only.

With Forms and Java - custom controls are used in my experience. Not
standard Windows controls.

Pardon me for getting technical on you, but I do not know how else to
explain what is happening:

Applications use the following Win32 API call to display the printer
dialog/selection box:

BOOL PrintDlg(
LPPRINTDLG lppd // address of structure with initialization data
);

The result says whether or not PrintDlg() was successful.

If not, then a call to CommDlgExtendedError() is in order to determine
the exact nature of the failure.

The app is suppose to handle this exception gracefully. For example,
if the failure returned by CommDlgExtendedError() is DERR_NODEVICES,
it should tell the user "Sorry, you do not have any printers
configured on your system".

Ditto for PDERR_PRINTERNOTFOUND. Or PDERR_LOADDRVFAILURE. Each time
around displaying a meaningful error message, telling the user *what*
went wrong.

The bottomline IMO. The application you are running, does not do this.
It gets an error. It ignores the error. It may even not be calling the
CommDlgExtendedError() to get the actual exception. Thus you are in
the dark as to what went wrong.

The two problems are not related at all from a technical Windows
perspective. You deal with different parts of the Win32 API spec. And
these API calls are implemented & supported on WinME, WinNT, Win2000
and WinXP. Nor do they share the same DLL or driver.

Clipboard functions are defined in winuser.h

Printer functions are defined in commdlg32.h (requiring
commdlg32.lib).

I doubt that this have anything to do with the problem - unless both
the problems you mention are due to dinkum bugs in the Microsoft code
that provides that Cliboard and Printer API services.

Which is unlikely. Both these services and APIs have been around for a
very long time.

So, amid all this technical stuff, what is the problem and how do you
fix it?

Why does it work on one machine and not the other?

Obviously, there are something different that results in different
bevahiour.

On the clipboard side. What runtime systems (e.g. Java or Forms) are
you using? Are they up to date? Have the latest RTS patches been
applied? Are the custom controls being used, correctly registered
(these are usually implemented in OCX's and need to be correctly
registered in the Registry)? Does copy-and-paste work within the
application itself?

On the printer side. With the Oracle App not telling you what is wrong
- do you have printers installed on the PCs giving problems? Is there
a default printer specified? Is the applicable printer drivers
installed?


--
Billy