Our last blog article dealt with promoting a help event so that dictionary help could be displayed when the user pressed F1 on a prompt. This was well received but it was pointed out that the technique crashed and burned when used from a multi-column edit table.

The reason for this is obvious - if an edit table has more than one column then it will logically also have more than one data dictionary item associated with it. So we need to determine which edit table column we are currently on and use this information to determine the correct dictionary item to use.

When we ask for the COLUMN property of an edit table, what we are provided with is a sub-value mark delimited array of all of the columns in the edit table. (The reason for this using such an unusual delimiter is simply that the columns property is derived from a larger array maintained by the system behind the scenes - the "control semantics"). Then to establish what column we're currently on we simply get the DEFPOSPROP property. (We could just get the CARETPOS property - but having been bitten once by not considering all possible permutations, we're now allowing for the possibility that a custom OLE control (which supports multiple columns) might not expose the current column using CARETPOS. So we use DEFPOSPROP which will always return the current column position regardless of how it is exposed. This assumes that the OLE control has been configured correctly using the New OLE Entity window described in this blog entry).

So without further ado we present the revised promoted event script!