Preview Flicker

rbuser

D6EE, RB6.03E

Hi DMs,

our customer uses SIEMENS PCs P3/800 MHz.

If they open a default preview window, they get a heavy flickering of all
opened windows on the desktop. This flickering is active up to 5 seconds,
then the previewer displays the selected report. We are doing no special
tricks with RB, just open an IB-Objects query connected to a pipeline and a
simple, compiled report (no use of packages).
If they press the print button in the previewer, the same happens until the
printer dialog appears.
No other application on these maschines shows this behaviour, so we are sure
to reduce this problem to the RB components when doing something with
printer canvas or drivers.

The whole thing looks very ugly and brings us in heavy discussions about the
quality of our application.

Any idea?

Robbi

rbuser

I forgot to tell that the operating system is Windows NT 4 SP 5 or 6.

rbuser

Sounds strange, but here are some questions I am sure are going to be asked
(I will ask them so that when DM is here, they will have the information):

-- What is their printer driver, including version? Have they updated that?
If they install a different printer and make that one their defualt, does
the problem continue?

-- What is their video card/driver? Latest driver?

HTH,
Ed Dressel
Team DM

digitalmetaphors

What happens if you run our demo end user reports exe on their machine's
configuration? Unfortunately, we don't have any NT4 boxes up and running to
test with at this time. Does the problem happen on all of their machines,
or just on the NT4 machines?


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Hi Jim, Hi Ed,

Thanks for your hints and questions.

- They only use NT4 boxes in their production environment
- On my own Win2000Pro machines with different configurations I can't
reproduce it
- At the moment I don't have any information about the hardware componentes
or the drivers of the NT machines.
They all are new from summer 2001 and were ready configured by SIEMENS.
- The printer drivers are from INMAC, a manufacturer of label printers and
barcode scanners. The driver version they use is from 11/2001
- We are printing labels with barcodes for normal production jobs directly
to the different INMAC printers, reprinted labels are printed into the
previewer.

The next days I will try to get more detailed information, then I will tell
you something more :-)

Bye

Robbi

rbuser

Install the printer drivers on your machine and see if the issue can be
reproduced.

Ed Dressel
Team DM

rbuser

Ed,

exactly the same drivers are installed on my W2K machines, there is no
flickering.

Robbi

rbuser

> exactly the same drivers are installed on my W2K machines, there is no

You are previewing using the printer drivers, correct? Hmmm... I would guess
a video card/driver issue. I don't know what your software costs, if it is
worth your time to go and find a video card/driver and see if that causes
the issue. If it isn't that, I don't know what would cause it.

Ed Dressel
Team DM

rbuser

First results:

three machines - three different graphic cards, each with its own drivers:

1 - RIVA TNT2 Modell 64 Pro 16MB Bios 3.05 Driver: NVIDIA nv4_mini.sys
2 - INTEL 815 4 MB Driver: i81xnt.sys
3 - MATROX MGA-G100 AGP 4 MB Driver mga64.sys

AFAIK, these cards are very different, aren't they? But all show that
flickering when opening the preview window to diplay the labels for the
INTERMEC printers.

I have a problem with the demo apps of DM: they need to have the BDE
installed, but we are not allowed to do this in the production environment
of our client :-( (BTW, like I told earlier, we use IBObjects V4 with
InterBase 6)
Do you still have another test or demo app running without the BDE?

ED, installing a driver for another printer makes no sense because our
software is used to print labels on just those two models of labelprinters
of INTERMEC. Hmmm, there is still a laser printer driver installed, I could
set this one as default printer to test its behaviour.

Still one idea: I changed the local settings to display the dates with
4-digit years. After pressing the OK button the same flickering can be seen
reproducable on these machines while windows sends broadcast messages to all
opened windows. Does the RB engine also send broadcast messages ?

Robbi

digitalmetaphors

We do have demos you could test with which don't require the BDE. Look in
your installed ..\RBuilder\Demos\EndUserDatabases directory.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors