BvG Docu and home stack in Metacard

[Björnke von Gierke]

On 08 Jun 2007, at 19:42, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> What would it take to be able to open Rev's Help right in MC?
>
> About half of their IDE. ;) They use a whole lot of custom Rev 
> handlers.
>
> I like the current mctranscript stack, it's very simple and easy. I 
> don't often feel a need for anything more complex, usually I just need 
> to look up a behavior or syntax. I'd like to see it updated to read 
> the new Rev docs. On the other hand, I'm not familiar enough with 
> BvG's version to know what I'm talking about. ;)

The Rev docu uses about 41 different stacks (for the dictionary alone), 
which get loaded and unloaded constantly during looking at the entries 
within the rev ide. Frankly I do not want to do something that slow, 
and it is the main reason why I used the export approach.
An alternative would be to put everything into one file, for example a 
stack, but with ca. 8 MB, that's quite a hefty chunk of RAM in my 
opinion (although you might reduce it by getting rid of all the xml 
stuff).

I had a very very quick look at the mcTranscriptDict.mc stacks script. 
It seems it relies mainly on the dictionary using "![CDATA[xyz]]" 
blocks, which the current documentation does not use anymore.
 From my quick glance i'd thus guess it would be easier to replace the 
xml external in my docslib stack with ken ray's xml lib, than using the 
code in the mcTranscriptDict stack... On the other hand it's clear I of 
all people would see it that way :P

Oh, I'm really not afraid of any competition in the third party 
documentation replacements market (strange thing to write). Actually I 
made all the actual data handling independent from the gui in my own 
project exactly to let people make more different gui's.

As for making the Rev dictionary entries accessible within MC (not 
using my stack), you need to gather this information:
1. the dict.index file contains all the entries with their index number 
(and some additional more or less usefull information).
2. the clumbs.index file contain which clumb stack contains which index 
number.
3. The revDocClumbXX.rev stacks contain the actual entries as numbered 
custom properties.
4. The actual entries are xml, and won't be parsed as valid, unless you 
have the DTD, which you can find in a customproperty somewhere within 
the revDocumentation stack (forgot where), or in a customproperty of 
the only card of my docslib stack.
5. Unfortunately the data contains quite some anomalies, wrong entries 
and strange inconsistencies, which you need to work around, or ignore 
(i.e. the different ways ">" (greater than ) is written in different 
places).

If you have gathered from all this the data you want, your stack will 
work in rev 2.7.2 and upwards. Of course you could go lower, but the 
format and files changed much with almost each release version before 
that.

cheers
Björnke

-- 

official ChatRev page:
http://chatrev.bjoernke.com

Chat with other RunRev developers:
go stack URL "http://homepage.mac.com/bvg/chatrev1.3.rev"