20. Writing 4GL Statements : Inquiring About and Setting Applications Status : Using the Inquire_forms Statement
 
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Using the Inquire_forms Statement
The inquire_forms statement lets you retrieve information at run time from the FRS, which manages many aspects of the forms displayed as an application runs.
For a large set of form objects and for the FRS itself, Ingres provides a set of constants containing information you can use to perform conditional processing, error handling, determine whether a field or column is derived, and so on. For each type of object, the inquire_forms statement returns a different set of constants. See Inquire_forms for more details. Inquire_forms does not operate on arrays.
The examples below show how to use inquire_forms to determine cursor location during an application. The first example finds the field (in the current form) on which the cursor currently rests:
inquire_forms field '' 
  (fname = name);
In the following example, inquire_forms determines the row and column position of the cursor so that a message can be displayed beneath the current cursor location:
inquire_forms frs (row=cursorrow,
  col=cursorcolumn);
row = row + 1;
message 'No employee found with that name'
  with style=popup (startcolumn= :col,   startrow=
  :row);