SET STATUS Bar, SET STATUS, SET SCOREBOARD, Set(“Status Bar”), Set(“Status”), Set(“Scoreboard”)

The first two commands here control the status bar at the bottom of the screen. SET SCOREBOARD doesn’t do anything, but it’s historically related to the other two.

Usage

SET STATUS BAR ON | OFF
SET STATUS ON | OFF
SET STATUS TIMEOUT TO [ nSeconds ]
cStatusBarOn = SET( "STATUS BAR" )
cStatusOn = SET( "STATUS" )

FoxPro has two different status bars. From way back into Xbase history, there’s the traditional Xbase status bar, controlled by SET STATUS. It appears two lines above the bottom of the screen. In dot-prompt days, two different kinds of messages appeared under the status bar. When FoxPro moved into the Windows world, it acquired a Windows-type status bar (Help refers to it as the “graphical status bar”). This one, set with SET STATUS BAR, goes at the very bottom of the screen and is much less dorky-looking than the old one.

The two status bars are mutually exclusive. Turning one on turns the other off. There are also a number of items that behave differently depending on which status bar is displayed. (See SET TALK for one example.) We recommend you use the Windows-style status bar in Windows applications. As always, it’s better to stick with a standard.

VFP 7 introduced a nasty interaction between the two status bars. If you have a program editing window (MODIFY COMMAND) open and SET STATUS ON, the editing window acquires an ugly, DOS-like status bar at the top. If you then SET STATUS BAR ON, the window's status bar doesn't go away, even though VFP regains it's Windows-style status bar. We don't even see the window-level status bar in earlier versions of VFP.

SET STATUS TIMEOUT has nothing to do with the Xbase-style status bar, despite the command it looks like, and despite its misplacement in the VFP 3 Help file. (It’s undocumented in VFP 5 and later.) Just another case of overloading. Certain messages (like SET TALK output) appear in the Windows-style status bar. This command lets you determine how long they stay there before the normal status information returns. Leave out nSeconds to reset to the five-second default. The maximum value accepted is 2,147,483,647 and, no, we didn’t test it. Well, just a little. Numbers over a few million seem to be ignored.

The SET() functions let you figure out which status bar (if either) is on. We haven’t found a way to determine the status timeout setting.

SET SCOREBOARD is totally ignored in Visual FoxPro—so much so, that it no longer has a topic in the Help file. Way back when, it determined where the CapsLock, NumLock and Insert indicators appeared.

Example

SET STATUS TIMEOUT TO 2
SET STATUS BAR ON

See Also

Set Clock, Set Notify, Set Talk