Saving Data in Standalones

[Peter Haworth]

Not again, I can hear some people saying!

I've just run into this long standing issue in the context of needing  
to save the filepath to my database across runs of Revolution and also  
various other settings I need to save which are currently in custom  
properties.

I'm not concerned about saving my applications data across runs  
because I'm using an sqlite database for that.  The stuff I need to  
preserve is more in the way of internal settings.  I'd prefer to leave  
them in custom properties if I can because storing them elsewhere will  
entail a substantial amount of work to find all the places in my code  
where I set and get custom properties and replace the logic with  
something else.

I've searched the list archives and the discussion forums and also  
read Sarah Reicheldt's revJournal article and Mark Wieders Conference  
presentation and still somewhat confused by the solutions to this.

The most common solution seems to be to create a single stack .rev  
file that does nothing except invoke the real .rev file and use it as  
the basis for the build of the standalone app.  But then I see  
mentions of that being a problem because of the lack of write access  
to the Applications folder (I'm primarily concerned with Macs) so I  
look at the permission on my Applications folder and I have full read  
and write access to it and the standalone Rev app so am I missing  
something?

Then there's the issue of how to implement that solution.  I see that  
Sarah's article recommends using the "Move substacks into individual  
files" option which Mark also describes but then advises against  
because of message passing hierarchy problems.  So should use that  
option or not?  And if I do, how do I open the mainstack of my  
real .rev file?  go stack URL or can I just go stack?

I'm also concerned about what seems to be a huge support issue.  If I  
understand this method correctly, the .rev file containing the real  
application will be just that, a .rev file not a compiled  
application.  If that's true what's to stop a user of my application  
who owns Revolution from changing my application code?

And then I ran across a post on the forum concerning a complication  
with this approach related to how to get the datagrid library included  
in the app.  There's a fairly simple workaround for it but now I'm  
wondering what other issues of that nature there might be.  How about  
the database library for example?  And right now, I insert a couple of  
front scripts into my app - should that logic stay in the real  
application or be moved to the single stack application?

So pity this poor unsuspecting user that thought the IDE might perhaps  
warn him if he tried to do something that absolutely would not work in  
a standalone application, or perhaps expected that an attempt to save  
something that couldn't be saved would at least throw an error in a  
standalone application, and believed the user guide section on  
building standalones which states "All of Revolution's feature set is  
available in a standalone application", followed by a couple of  
exceptions which don't include the fact that you can't save data in  
them, and the section on global variables that notes that you can't  
save them across runs and recommends, amongst other things, saving  
them in a custom property if you need to do that.

Help!

Pete Haworth