Saving data in a stack =?iso-8859-1?q?=AD?=STANDALONE

[John Ridge]

As a complete beginner with Revolution I¹ve found it very hard to get a grip
on this. It¹s a big stumbling block for those used to Hypercard, where the
IDE was taken for granted, and the concept of a standalone was unfamiliar.
But the ability to deliver standalones cross-platform is a major attraction
of Revolution ­ so it¹s disappointing that such a key feature as how to save
user changes to a stack is hard to grasp.

I can understand that a standalone is an application, and as such shouldn¹t
modify itself ­ i.e. the user can¹t save any changes within the application.
No problem ­ write it out to a file, and read it back in on startup. But
with structured data such as an Address Book you want to save the data as a
stack ­ that¹s the whole point!

The answer given in the documentation is to set up a "dummy" stack as the
mainstack, then do the work in a substack which is not itself compiled into
a standalone, but left as a Revolution file (.rev). I simply couldn¹t get
this to work, until I came across the answer in the lists.runrev archive ­
go to the Standalone Settings item on the File menu - select the "Stacks"
tab - click the box to "Move substacks into individual stackfiles".

This makes the substack persist as a .rev. The standalone knows where it is
(automagically in the standalone's folder), and because it's a .rev it can
be saved...

Before finding this tip, I had been messing about for ages trying to get the
standalone to pick up .rev files that were not part of its stack file.

Ah wellŠ

--