Best way to manage Stacks in a standalone

Len Morgan len-morgan at crcom.net
Thu Oct 11 07:06:42 EDT 2007


I've got an application I'm working on that runs as a standalone that 
needs a few "debug/maintenance" stacks (to fix user mistakes) from time 
to time.  I've been having a little trouble trying to get these stacks 
to come up when needed (from a menu).  What is best practice with Rev to 
handle the following requirements:

1) I'd rather they didn't popup while the program was loading (as I call 
"start using stack xxx in the preOpenStack).
2) I want these maintenance stacks to be separate .rev files as opposed 
to substacks of the main stack (so they can be updated individually)
3) At least one of these stacks (my debug stack) needs to have a field 
updated while the program is running but not seen until I want to see 
what the user was doing.  This doesn't necessarily have to be saved when 
the user quits but it would be nice if it could be as long as it could 
be limited to some "reasonable" maximum length.  Perhaps when the 
program quits, I could save the last XXX lines of the file (or delete 
the first [total_lines - lines to save] lines and save the stack).

I had been trying to set a stacks "visible" to false when I'm saving it 
then set the "visible" to true when I want to see it.  When I hit cancel 
on the stack (when I'm finished with it), I set visible back to false.

I've also seen people set the loc to somewhere offscreen but otherwise 
leave it visible and open (just not visible to the user most of the 
time).  When I need it, I can just set the loc to the middle of the screen.

Still others use pop-ups but I can't seem to get these to work reliably 
when the stack needs to be "available" while the programming is running.

So, what would be the "best" way to handle this?  Any advice or words of 
wisdom are greatly appreciated.

Len Morgan




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