RecordMark, DeleteMark

These two properties determine whether a grid has the two special columns at the left that contain a little record pointer and indicate deleted records, respectively.

Usage

grdGrid.RecordMark = lHasRecordMark
lHasRecordMark = grdGrid.RecordMark
grdGrid.DeleteMark = lHasDeleteMark
lHasDeleteMark = grdGrid.DeleteMark

Although we’ve shown both of these as needing logical values, you can actually specify 0 or 1 (for .F. and .T., respectively) as well. We can’t figure why this is, since generally you can’t use numerics for logicals in FoxPro. Guess some C guy got carried away.

If you set both of these to .F. (or zero), the left-hand border of the grid is pretty wimpy looking. So, even if you don’t want delete markers (and you probably don’t), you may want the RecordMark column. A grid with RecordMark = .T. and DeleteMark = .F. looks pretty nifty. The DeleteMark is pretty lame—it blacks out an entire box. We’d prefer an “X” or skull-and-crossbones, or even better, a column where we can put in our own controls and method calls—come to think of it, we can do that! And we think you should.

So why don’t you want delete markers? When DeleteMark is .T., the user can delete a record by clicking on the delete mark for that row. At that point, triggers fire, the record needs to be locked and so forth. We don’t think we’ll be writing many applications in which deletion should be as easy as clicking in a grid. Generally, deletion is a pretty serious operation and you should control it in your app. We’ve also heard some stories about locking issues and the like when users delete records from parent-child grids or try to use a single click to both select and delete a record. Although we haven’t been able to replicate these ourselves, we’ve heard enough of them to believe that allowing deletion in grids requires kid gloves.

A DeleteMarkReadOnly property to let our users look but not touch has been suggested by others, but we’d suggest you drop the DeleteMark altogether and add in a read-only check box.

Example

* Add a record mark to an existing grid
ThisForm.grdMyGrid.RecordMark = .T.

See Also

ActiveRow, Delete, Deleted, Recall, RecNo()