QTIPS - Using INIT.VIEW with Printers

Al Blake at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge recently asked - "how do I work INIT.VIEW with the printer?". This is a problem infrequently seen so for the benefit of those who have not encountered it….. If you make a call to INIT.VIEW and set @VIEW.MODE to 1, screen output will be paged a la LIST command (REVMEDIA passim). If in the same program you subsequently turn the printer on and print to it, corruption occurs: the screen flashes the heading and a box is sent to the printer.

After initial experimentation involving setting @VIEW.MODE to 0, it was eventually found that setting @VIEW.MODE to null ("") or TRANSFERing @VIEW.MODE to a dummy variable (which accomplishes the same result) fixes the problem.

   * Finish screen output
   @VIEW.MODE = ""
   PRINTER ON
   * etc

This is interesting as it implies that the person responsible for testing @VIEW.MODE at RevTech is not using a boolean (IF @VIEW.MODE THEN) check, but is using a length comparison (IF LEN(@VIEW.MODE) THEN).

(Volume 2, Issue 5, Page 7)