alert.prg

(App, Yugoslavia)

A little routine which eventually turned to be a replacement for messagebox() calls, though we didn't even know what a messagebox is when we were writing it.

It began as a shorthand for a popup menu, using the existing menu mechanism, written by Sale before 1989. But then it didn't look right, being always in the center, fixed width etc. Then in fox 2.6 there were other choices so we finally had real commandbuttons, so tried that. With lots of experimenting and cosmetics (button shadows and other DOS eye candy by Joška), we had an usable version in march 1995. June 1996 started working on VFP version. By end of 1997 it had (again, feature from DOS version) the option to line up the buttons vertically if more than 4. october 1998. the description/prompt is now split into as many labels as needed, wraps much better than the editbox we used before (and never knew how big to make it). Hotkeys on buttons are selected automatically. Defaults to "OK" if no buttons defined; returns the ordinal number of the button pressed or zero if none (ESC, close box). No predefined sets of buttons - to get this picture, just issue

nWhich=alert("Kaži šta da se radi.", "Žiko, piši:;zipuj;Popuni hijerarhiju;Napuni tabele;Izađi")

In 1999. made it public domain by posting it on UA. Twenty years later, the download counter stands at 2955.

Still running it as the main switchboard in Byo (see image) and the app which maintains sGradlj.com and a few other places. (well, it did so while I still used fox for it, but then there's aversion in python, named just the same and doing the exactly same thing)

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Mentions: 08-V-1994., 17-II-1995., 06-III-1995., 10-III-1995., 09-II-1998., april 1999., 09-III-2000., 15-VIII-2000., 13-VI-2001., 23-IV-2002., 27-VIII-2008., 16-V-2009., 23-X-2021., 03-XII-2021., 11-VII-2025., Aleksandar Raskov (Sale), Byo (Byo), defg.prg, fox, GenerAll, Joška Apro, sGradlj.com, TaxiSys, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian

11-VIII-2019 - 9-IV-2026