The OpenEdge Hive

When I had an alert-box that I wanted to keep for information purposes, I used to ALT-PrintScreen it and paste it to MS Paint. I just learned that you can just CTRL-C the alert-box and paste it to any text editor (e.g. Notepad).

e.g. Lets say I run the following line in a file called "C:\Pro_tmp\Hello.p":
MESSAGE PROGRAM-NAME(1) SKIP(2) "Hello~nworld" VIEW-AS ALERT-BOX BUTTONS OK-CANCEL TITLE "gem".

If I copy paste the resulting message box, it will give the following text:

---------------------------
gem (Press HELP to view stack trace)
---------------------------
C:\Pro_tmp\Hello.p

Hello
world
---------------------------
OK Cancel Help
---------------------------

(the -debugalert parameter in my session explains the extra "Help" text and button)

I'll surely save at least 5 minutes each week (and many re-typing errors) with that.
We have a 17 years Progress veteran here that didn't know this trick, so I thought I wasn't alone in my ignorance and that some other people like us would like to know it. :)

This tip seems to also work on other *standard* alert-boxes / message-boxes in Windows.