Some Basic Misunderstandings/Problems with RunRev - aka Help!

[Frank Leahy]

On Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 06:52  PM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> From: David Burgun <dburgun at dsl.pipex.com>
> Subject: Re: Some Basic Misunderstandings/Problems with RunRev - aka
> 	Help!
> Hi,
>
> I've seen that I can save it as a text file but this seems like a lot
> of work and for reasons explained below I don't think that this is
> the best way to do it (unless I have no alternative). I have really
> large number of controls and need to save the state of all of them.
> This is not just "Preferences" this is the whole of the GUI for a
> large application.
>
> I found this already, but as I said this isn't preference data, this
> is normal GUI data. I do have a preferences panel and this refers to
> the preferences of the app, the rest of the (large number) of
> stacks/cards/controls refer to preferences on how to process the data
> from the XML file(s).
>
> Not sure what is the best thing to do now.
> All the Best
> Dave
>
>
Dave,

You have two options:

1) Create a standalone that is a splash screen only, that then opens a 
separate stack residing in a folder (e.g. next to the app).  You *can* 
then save your stack because it is not part of the standalone.

2) I went through some of the same issues you are going through when 
deciding whether to make my preferences stack (which has 8 tabs, and 
dozens of control on each tab) a stack or a preferences file.  After 
thinking about it for awhile I realized that if I used the stack model, 
and then needed to change the format of the stack, e.g. add another 
tab, or move some controls around, it was going to be impossible to do 
so.  How, I wondered, was I going to get the data out of the user's 
current preferences stack, and into the new preferences stack?  In fact 
the more I thought about it, the more I realized I would have to create 
an intermediate text file representation to do any upgrade, and if I 
was going to do have to do that, why not bite the bullet and just use 
the preferences file from the start.

So that's what I did.  It took a little more work to get things 
working, but I am very glad I'm using a preferences file at this point, 
rather than saving the data in the stack.

Just my 2p worth.

-- Frank Leahy