The OpenEdge Hive

The value you assign to the ForeColor needs to be a valid 3 byte integer. The easy way to turn any colour into a 3 byte integer is to 'bitshift' the RGB value of the colour.

The valid range for a normal RGB colour is 0 (black) to 16,777,215 (white). Get the RGB value of the colour you require |R|G|B| i.e. |72|228|36| = light green (the free image editor Paint.Net will give you the rgb colour from a colour wheel).

To bitshift the colour into a valid integer you multiply each octet by the range of the previous octet to "shift" it to the left. For example with the light green mentioned above:

 |72|    228    |      36      |
      *256 (2^8)  *65536 (2^16)        which gives
 |72|   58368   |    2359296   |

You then just add the 3 integers together to give the integer value of the colour.

Here are some examples:

Pale Blue   = 16764875 (203,207,255)
Pale Yellow = 11205630 (254,251,170)
Pale Green  = 13237940 (180,254,201)
Pale Red    = 12303359 (255,187,187)

White       = 16777215 (255,255,255)
Black       = 0        (0,0,0).

The easiest example to show is white:

R  255         =      255
G  255 * 256   =    65280
B  255 * 65536 = 16711680 +
                 --------
                 16777215

I hope that helps!

~Cyrix