Saving data in List Magic tables

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Thu Aug 5 10:35:10 EDT 2010


charles61 wrote:

> I have a standalone consisting of a splash stack and an app stack. I have set
> up a script that the user can insert some information into two tables - one
> for students and one for adults. These tables are on two different cards in
> my app stack.
>
> I have been testing my standalone on Windows XP where it was installed in
> the AllUsersAppData directory using an installer program.  I tried the
> following script for the card that has the student list:
>
> on closeCard
>    Save "School Report" as "\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application
> Data"
> end closeCard
>
> But this does not save the data in the two tables!  Any suggestions would be
> greatly appreciated!

When the unexpected happens, it's time for error-checking.   One of the 
challenges of crafting apps is that when you're being diligent only 
about half your code will actually do what your app does, and the other 
half will be all the stuff you add to account for when things go wrong. :)

In Rev, most error conditions are reported in "the result" immediately 
after a command fails, and for I/O and other system-related tasks you 
may find an additional OS-supplied error code using the sysError function.

So to better understand what's happening there you may try adding that 
to your script.

Also, by hard-wiring your paths they won't work on international systems 
where the spelling may differ, and may not survive changes to the OS if 
MS changes the names of those folders in a future version.

The solution for that is Rev's specialFolderPath function.  Rev provides 
a variety of constants you can pass to that function to get the path, 
and pretty much all OS constants provided by the OS vendor can be used 
as well -- Ken Ray's put together this comprehensive list:
<http://sonsothunder.com/devres/revolution/tips/file010.htm>

While Rev doesn't include a built-in constant for that, looking at Ken's 
list you can use the OS constant instead, which is "35".

If you want that to be cross-platform you can use Ken's list to get the 
Application Support constant for OS X, but for now here's your code 
modified with specialFolderPath and including the error check which will 
hopefully help diagnose the issue.

A ha!  As I was rewriting your code I noticed that you're specifying 
only the folder and not the file name, so effectively you're asking Rev 
to try to turn the stack into a folder, which of course it can't do. 
The fix for that is included in this revision:

on closeCard
    Save "School Report" as (specialFolderPath(35)&"/School Report.rev")
    if the result is not empty then
       answer error "An error occurred while saving the report: "&cr&\
          the result & "("& sysError() &")"
     end if
end closeCard

Note that the ".rev" extension can be changed to anything else you feel 
might be appropriate for your app. Rev opens stacks based on their 
internal stucture, and a standalone is not required to use the .rev file 
name extension to work with stack files, allowing you to define your own 
document types.

If you want to use a custom file name extension you may want to check 
<http://filext.com/> to see if another program may be using it.  That's 
not a comprehensive list (Microsoft doesn't maintain such an index), but 
it'll at least help avoid some of the more obvious conflicts.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv



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