Ken Sletten writes:

> > 1) A completion bar or a message appearing at every
>  > thousandth DBGET during the [multi]find commands.
>
>  Someone was already good enough to point out that this
>  was added to and appeared on the current 1998 SIGIMAGE
>  Ballot after Frank made this suggestion last year:  It is item
>  # 34.2:  FIND, etc:  Running count progress without CTRL-Y.
>  Ballot results next week after polls close..       :-)

>  Having said all of the above, speaking just for myself I think
>  Frank's above suggestion fits in pretty well with the six
>  items that are already on the SIGIMAGE Enhancement
>  ballot for QUERY;  most have been estimated to be a Small
>  or Medium effort to implement....

Frank's request truly is a relatively small effort -- and I meant to reply
when he first suggested it, but things simply got too busy at this end. There
is a small modification to the request that I would offer, however. The bar
doesn't need to be by thousands or any other fixed unit. Rather, it would be
much better if it were in percentage completed (and it ain't difficult to do).

One of the very pleasant things about IMAGE is that you always know your worst
case search before you begin. If you're doing a serial search of a detail
dataset, you know you're going to have to search is from the beginning of the
set to its highwater mark. If you're doing a serial search of a master, you're
going to have to search the entire set. And if you're doing either a chained
or superchained search, you know before you begin how many records you're
going to touch (the DBFIND will tell you this information in the status word),
thus putting together a progress bar in percent complete is very
straightforward. In QueryCalc, we used the line drawing set and allocated 30
spaces, every 3 marked by a line drawing set "tic".

Once we put this in and delievered it to our users, it was one of the most
appreciatively commented on features we ever implemented -- and it only took a
few hours to put together.

Wirt Atmar