Learning Rev3 - Calendar Tutorial Questions

[J. Landman Gay]

Mark Srebnik wrote:

> 2. Good Way to Edit Background Group Across Multiple Cards
> 
> Found myself editing February card and then realizing that this was
> probably a mistake, as I'd need to make the same corrections to about
> 9-10 more cards...one for each month....
> 
> Seems to me know that it would make more sense to have design that
> carries over month to month so that you don't have to change each
> month individually if you have changes. However, maybe that's not
> possible with this tutorial as each month has different days in it??

Right. Fields in background groups have a property called "sharedText" 
which determines whether the text is the same on all cards or varies for 
each card. For labels and such, you usually want them shared. For other 
things (like the calendar dates) you don't. In this tutorial, you want 
to share field text for things like the days of the week, but not for 
the calendar days themselves or the name of the month. Regardless, the 
field is being shared; the only difference is whether the text varies 
card-to-card or not. This allows you to change things like the field 
placement, size, color, font, etc. and the changes will appear on every 
card that uses the shared group. Only the text will change on each card.

For this tutorial you just type in all the dates for every month, and 
since the sharedtext of that field is false, Rev will keep track of 
which card shows what dates. However, there are lots of scripts floating 
around that will auto-calculate the dates that should appear in each 
month. I think RR decided this would be too much for a beginner tutorial 
so they left it out.

A more advanced tutorial would probably not do a calendar this way. One 
method I've used is to have only a single card that auto-calculates and 
enters the dates when the user changes months, and any user entries 
(like appointments) are stored in a custom property and dynamically 
loaded into the field on demand when the month is displayed. That's a 
bit much for a basic beginner tutorial though.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com