Using Widgets in Forms and Reports

Use widgets in forms and reports to represent entities and fields and to control how users can use the data in those fields.

Note: All widgets in Microsoft Windows applications are administered by the operating system via window handles, which are used for all widgets, cursors, fonts, and so on. The maximum number of window handles is 16,364. When this limit is reached, you cannot draw more widgets, and there is no warning or error.

Avoid using large numbers of widgets on a component. Too many widgets on a component can make the appearance very busy and confusing.
If the component contains a large number of fields (several hundred), define them as Unifields, rather than widgets. Unifields do not require any Microsoft Windows resources.
If the end user might be running several Microsoft Windows applications at the same time, or running multiple virtual instances of Uniface under Uniface Anywhere, limit the number of widgets per component to approximately 100.
For widgets that are used to browse entities, you must first build the list of values that the widget should contain before displaying their representations.
Similarly, you cannot use a list box or drop-down list to show multiple occurrences of a foreign entity, without first retrieving and building the list, then assigning that list to a widget in a form. You can build and manipulate value-representation (ValRep) lists using ProcScript. For more information, see List Handling in ProcScript.