use-revolution Digest, Vol 80, Issue 16

[J. Landman Gay]

Graham & Heather Harrison wrote:

> I feel as if I've run afoul of the
> Church-of-we-don't-do-it-that-way/Denomination-rev/Sect-externals.

Hey, I warned you. :) I'm glad you're a good sport.

> Mark kindly provided a script for binding Externals. I wish I had
> seen it earlier. It cuts out a lot of extraneous stuff introduced by
> the Externals Lessons on runRev - e.g. requiring the destroyWindow
> property to be set to true before the save stack.

Mark's script does the same thing as setting the externals property in 
the inspector. The inspector just automates it. But easier, as I 
mentioned today but should have told you ages ago, is to just drop the 
external into your user Externals folder and leave it at that. I'm 
trying to figure out why I didn't say so right away. Maybe I was 
overcome by data overload. Or senility.

Rev has lots of different ways to get to the same outcome, for lots of 
different things. We all have our preferences, which can be confusing 
for a newcomer. I think you got caught in the crossfire.

> As I have read (this
> thread or elsewhere) the handling of Externals is different in the
> IDE and standalones. From the discussion between Jacque and Paul this
> is not straightforward, and is not handled in the documentation. It
> would appear that this script would need to upgraded to work in both
> environments.

Yes. The startup handler I posted is another way to do it.

> 
> Mark, you asked why I considered mentioning setting the
> Preferences/Files & Memory/User Extensions. Because my two primary
> sources - Externals Lesson 2 (explicitly), and Shao Sean's revUp
> article on ssMacWindows (implicitly), told me to. But your response,
> and my testing, raises the question - what is it used
> for.

Rev provides a permanent user folder so that you can store things like 
your own externals and plugins separately from the ones that ship with 
the IDE. The IDE stores its own resources inside its app folder, which 
changes each time a new version is downloaded. In order to keep your own 
custom additions intact across updates, those are stored separately in 
that user folder.

By default, Rev provides a folder at ~/Documents/My Revolution 
<edition>/ as the default location to store your own stuff. Most people 
just leave it that way and drop their customizations into it. However, 
if you object to storing things in Documents for some reason, you can 
move the folder elsewhere. If you do that, Rev needs to know where it is 
so that it can load your customizations when the IDE launches. You tell 
it where your folder is by changing that field in Preferences.

Again, I think you were misled a little bit because there are so many 
options in Rev to make the IDE what you want it to be. But in general 
the default is the way to go while learning. Once you know what 
everything does, then you can modify it. The user folder doesn't require 
editing any text files or anything else, just drop your files into the 
correct subfolder ("Externals" or "Plugins" generally.) "Resources" 
holds the tutorials and pdfs you download from the Learning Center, 
among other things, and you won't usually put anything in there 
manually. Plugins and Externals are the two you are most likely to add to.

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