Learning Rev3 - Calendar Tutorial Questions

[Mark Srebnik]

THANKS, Jacqueline, for this and your previous reply. It really helps make things clearer for me....

Onward and upward.... ;-)

Mark
-----Original Message-----
>From: "J. Landman Gay" <jacque at hyperactivesw.com>
>Sent: Oct 20, 2008 12:49 PM
>To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>Subject: Re: Learning Rev3 - Calendar Tutorial Questions
>
>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