User Extensions/Externals

[J. Landman Gay]

Graham & Heather Harrison wrote:

> I am nowhere near deploying, just learning. This parameter is
> available, but seemingly not used by rev until you rub it's nose in
> it. Since I dislike doing things twice, I see no reason to repeat the
> information in a rev script. And the two lessons available, get
> around the problem by making the user select the file, which is just
> as unpalatable.
> 
> Now you introduce choosecutomizationpath which may be a good solution
> but I can find no reference to it in the user guide, or the
> dictionary. Not the first such omission by any means.

Mark S. has given you an undocumented, internal IDE command. I would not 
use it, not at this point in your learning experience.

The second lesson I mentioned explains what to do to make the external 
available universally throughout the IDE. I don't think that's what you 
want to do, so you can ignore that for now.

The lessons ask you to choose a file, but that is a one-time only event 
for the initial setup. It isn't what your users will do, and you won't 
have to do it twice either.

> 
> Actually, Jacque's suggestion:
>> I usually put the external in the same working folder with my stack
>> and point the stack's externals property to a relative file path.
> sounds very good to me. As soon as I decipher the guide's explanation
> I will give it a go.

In a nutshell: you need to attach the external to your stack. Externals 
only load when the stack first opens. You can set the stack's externals 
property and after that, each time the stack loads it will also load the 
external. For now, that's what I'd do. You are not using a 
cross-platform external, only a Mac one, so for now don't worry about 
jugging the OS versions, etc. Keep it simple to start. If I were 
teaching a class, I wouldn't recommend messing with externals at all at 
this point, so do the bare minimum to get it working and worry about the 
finer details later.

Put your external bundle into the same folder with your working stack. 
Set the externals in the property inspector to the path to the bundle. 
For now, use a hard-coded file path specific to your Mac. Save the 
stack, close it, reopen it, the external should be available. This isn't 
a portable solution, due to the hard-coded file path, but it will let 
you continue working and learning. You can fix it later.

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