Consider the following situation; a customer develops a graphical program, either using the Screen Painter of the IDE or coding everything by hand. The program contains an Screen with several bitmaps on the push-buttons that are entered as relative paths, they work ok if the program is running standalone however running on a client/server environment (Thin Client or WebClient for instance) there are more things to take into account. What are the options to make these bitmaps available to the program no matter where it's run?

The options for making your bitmaps available to W$BITMAP load at run time are:

1. Use a relative path and start iscserver from the same folder as the bitmaps
2. Put the path to the bitmaps in the CLASSPATH (in isserver.vmoptions in case of Windows service)
3. Use a configuration variable for the root directory, reference the variable, and build the full path to pass to W$BITMAP (iscobol.mybmppath=c:mainroot - Accept bit-root from environment mybmppath)

The #3 is the best practice, especially for ISVs that will be installing on different systems.

Also, there is a way to load a bitmap from the client machine, approach that has two considerations: it can be faster because the request doesn't go to the server, however there is a caveat, this option needs to have the bitmaps in all the client machines.

Following some code snippets to illustrate the above suggestions:

Using relative path

    CALL "W$BITMAP" USING WBITMAP-LOAD
                          "resources	ool.png"
                   GIVING h-tool

    CALL "W$BITMAP" USING WBITMAP-LOAD
                          "tool.png"
                   GIVING h-tool

    CALL "W$BITMAP" USING WBITMAP-LOAD-FROM-CLIENT
                          "my-logo.png"
                   GIVING h-logo

1. How to copy data from the clipboard
2. How do I center a window on the desktop?
3. UNC Paths with Browser Control don't work. What can I do to solve it?
4. Does isCOBOL provide GUI design support?
5. iscobol.font.default and DEFAULT-FONT
6. What are the specific fonts that isCOBOL uses by default?
7. Can I have an entry-field that more or less works the same as Google Search? So I would like to be able to change the contents of the list while the user is typing...
8. Did you know isCOBOL has the Accordion control?
9. Does isCOBOL provide Graph modules to show statistics?
10. Is it possible to sort dates in a grid control?
11. Working with a grid control is there a way to get the double-click event?
12. How can I show an animated gif with isCOBOL?
13. How can I refresh the current contents of the paged grid?
14. Is there a way to show leading zeros when numeric data items are displayed on a character based screen?
15. Did you know isCOBOL supports a tip inside the entry-field and combo-box controls when they are empty?
16. Did you know how to customize color of the borders of some controls?
17. Is it possible to configure the color of the read-only entry-fields?
18. Did you know that you can protect a Grid from editing without coding any event?
19. Gradient effects
20. How to detect if a computer has more than one monitor and use any of them?
21. Do isCOBOL GUI Screens have resizing capabilities?
22. How to add pages and GUI controls inside them to a tab control dynamically?
23. How may I display a notification window that requires no user intervention?
24. Can I modify the GUI controls of a Screen program from a called routine?
25. Modernizing your COBOL application by using isCOBOL Compiler code injection
26. How to use font-based icons in isCOBOL GUI programs
27. Modernize your character application
28. How to adjust program screens to different screen resolutions.
29. How to add helpful options to the Status-Bar control