Console applications interface

Hi everyone, i'm developing a simple application wich will interact with a database, adding, changing and deleting records of it. I want to create a friendly and intuitive interface to allow users doing that. I've seen applications that user can jump from and to an option using tab key, and instead of textboxes data is entered in a line fill with ........................... I hope you can understand what i'm looking for, i don't know if it was a fine explanation.
Regards.

You are probably looking for Curses, also called NCurses.

Todd

That's what i'm looking for. I'm developing this software for windows platform, I also have read that conio.h is the file wich replace curses.h for windows. But I'm using dev-c++ and conio.h only have a few definitions and I may not be able to get all functionality of it. So, is there another way to do it?

Hi . You have to include windows.h and use console API

See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...73(VS.85).aspx

If you want to use curses, there is a library called pdcurses that works with Windows.

Otherwise, the native Windows console API functions as linked to above will do these sort of things, probably requiring a bit of wrapping them into more suitable functions for your application, e.g. you may want a function that reads a string of certain length from a specific location on the screen:

Code:

---

// Return 0 on success, otherwise non-zero.
int readStringXY(int x, int y, char *str, size_t maxlen, const char *allowedChars);

---

The last argument, allowedchars, is used to tell the function for example to only accept digits for reading an integer (and perhaps '-', '+', 'e', '.' for a float) - you can then wrap up a function like this:

Code:

---

// Returns 1 on invalid number, 0 on valid.
int checkValidNumber(const char *buf, int *value, int min, int max)
{
    char *ptr;
    *value = strtol(buf, 0, &ptr);
    if (*ptr) return 1;  // Last char parsed is not NUL - we didn't accept the whole string.
    if (*value > max || *value < min) return 1;
    return 0;
}

// Return 0 on success.
int readIntXY(int x, int y, int *value, size_t ndigits, int min, int max)
{
    char buf[12];
    if (ndigits == 0 || ndigits > 11) ndigits = 11;
    sprintf(buf, "%d", *value);
    do {
        readStringXY(x, y, buf, ndigits, "0123456789");
    } while(checkValidNumber(buf, value, min, max));
    return 0;
}

---

You will probably also find yourself adding a function pointer to check the validity for special cases (social security number or such, post/zip-code, telephone numbers, etc, etc). Something like this:

Code:

---

typedef int (*CheckFunc)(const char *buf);
int readStringXYCheck(int x, int y, char *buf, size_t maxlen, const char *allowedChars, CheckFunc checkfunc)
{
    do
    {
        readStringXY(x, y, buf, maxlen, allowedchars);
    } while(checkfunc(buf));
    return 0;
}

---

--
Mats

Thank you guys. That's just what I was looking for.

I have a new problem. Windows.h file from Dev-C++ compilator doesn't have defined any function mentioned above. I don't have any trouble to change to another compilator, but what will be the best choice, if I also need to work with databases (so, sql.h need to have all required functions definition)?

Yes, you'll probably have to install the libraries/headers for your compiler -- go to the pdcurses website.