RunRev for iPhone and iPod Touch

[Richard Gaskin]

Martin Blackman wrote:
> silly question, but what does one do with a zero-width column ?

Not silly at all.  I got the idea from Ken Ray, and have been a strong 
advocate of it since.  But when I first heard about it, I had the same 
question. :)

Suppose you want to display records from a database in a multi-column 
list field.  You'll want to keep track of the ID field, but that's just 
noise to the end-user so you don't want to display it.

Currently, you'd have to parse out that column and store it in a 
separate field.  When the user clicks on a line in the list, you look up 
the corresponding line in the ID field to do whatever you need to do 
with that record.

But then you want to sort the list.  So you have to recombine the ID 
field with the rest of the list contents, do the sort, then parse them 
apart again for display.

Ugh.

Not the sort of thing I want to spend time in a seminar at a corporation 
when I'm trying to teach them how to use Rev.

With a zero-width column, you can effectively "hide" any data you want, 
yet still keep it bound to the rest of the display.  Simple, convenient, 
easy to learn.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com