scanning Forté 4GL UDS GUIs

... the easy part ...

the Forté GUIs are not compiled at all, even in a C++ produced Forté applications the GUIs are still displayed through the VM interpreter. as a token you may have noticed the way Forté exports GUIs in a .wex, .pex or .cex file a blob of Hex, the produced C++ bears the same value in an binary array var.

now as the GUIs code is not compiled it is preserved in a way that makes things easy to crawl through all the items that constitute a _Window object.

as per the screen copy supra, opening the workspace and crawling the plans, classes ...

with the following snippet

aVoidObj now references an Array that contains the class definition of the example window

having a look at the local variables

the tree like structure describes all the items that the window is made of.

it is now only a matter of carefully matching the Forté ‘FieldWidget’ or ‘MenuWidget’ to the ones available to the target platform. all the attributes as bound objects, size, placement, visibility, behaviour and more are available through the Widget (or child classes) attributes and methods.

time consuming but not rocket science.