Restraining the pencil in Rev

[Thomas McGrath III]

Hey Joe,

I got confused by this at first in building standalones. You're not  
alone. ;-)

You may already know some of this but for anyone following this thread  
it might help.

OK, So you want to build an application that can save 'apparent'  
document files. Why, because on most Operating systems the actual  
application itself can not be modified while running, so it can't save  
itself. OK, so the answer is to build an app that can store things in  
another document(stack) instead, thereby not changing itself but  
rather it is changing the 'other' document(stack) which is not self  
running.

OK, so in Revolution we use stacks for most everything so our  
'document' is actually a stack and our 'application' is actually a  
stack too. The problem you ran into is that the standalone/application  
has the cards that you want to save in it and it is actually the  
'document' stack that should have the cards that you want to save.  
(You have your 50 cards in the wrong stack if you want to save them  
easily)

For the most part most people will build either a splash screen stack  
as the non-editable application stack or a minimal application stack  
that has most of the 'engine' of your application and then use another  
stack as the savable stack or document stack. If you do it this way  
then all of the 50 cards should NOT be in the application stack but  
rather in the document stack. Then when you open your standalone/ 
application stack as a running application it should then open the  
separate documentation stack after loading and then right away from  
your standalone application you should save that just opened stack  
under a new name. This ensures that the original is not written over  
by your stack or the user.

Now that the document stack is saved (from the application stack) any  
and all changes made to that stack will be saved when you issue the  
save command.

So, incase your stack crashes etc. you should have a save command on  
quit and on close etc. to ensure the best chance the stack is saved.

I hope this helps and explains the issue.


Tom McGrath

On Sep 21, 2008, at 11:30 AM, Joe Lewis Wilkins wrote:

> I guess this is my day for confusion. (smile) I'm not using a player  
> for any of this.
>
> I have a fairly simple stack consisting of some 50 cards, each of  
> which has one or more images and some fields and/or buttons. Using  
> the bucket tool, a user may color inside the lines of the images as  
> they see fit - often pretty complex. Once colored, they may print  
> portions of the cards that I designate in the print routine; but,  
> once the stack is closed, all of these colorations disappear. I  
> would like for them to be able to Save a copy of the colorized stack  
> under a new name, as a document?, from the standalone. Then, as you  
> have indicated it can, have that copy open as a document "of" the  
> standalone when double clicked upon. So far, I've used:
>
> 	case "Save..."
>         answer "Save Coloring Book?" with "Cancel" or "OK"
>         if it is "Cancel" then exit menuPick
>         save this stack
>      break
>      case "Save A Copy As..."
>         answer "Save a Copy of this Coloring Book?" with "Cancel" or  
> "OK"
>         if it is "Cancel" then exit menuPick
>         clone this stack
>         save stack ("Copy of "&(the effective name of this stack))
>      break
>
> This kind of works, but doesn't result in a separate stack that  
> contains the colored images; just the same as the original, "plain"  
> images stack.
>
> Thanks for all your comments.
>
> Joe Wilkins
>
>
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