User Extensions/Externals

[Graham & Heather Harrison]

I sent this (except for the final point) to the wrong address. So here it is to the right one.

All together now,
No! No! A thousand times no! I'd rather die than say yes!

Mark Wieder wrote: No…NoNoNoNo…No
Thierry D. wrote: I second what Mark Wieder says

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

The main reasons given for not doing it my way (cue for another song?) is that it won't work when I convert to a standalone, or when there is a new version of rev. No matter how many times I say that this is for learning, everyone wants me to create standalones. Ain't going to happen soon. By the time it does I will know much more and be able to convert. A new version of rev? I will probably have created standalones before then.

The beauty of my method (for learning) is that the Externals are available for each new stack without any extra work at all. If you want to write small test stacks for various scenarios, that is a big boon.

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.

It has three drawbacks as far as I see it:
. The internal code has to be repeated for each External you want to use. (And please don't say, "Nobody would want to use more than one External!") Do it my way (that song just won't go away), and all externals are immediately available.
. I now have a button I don't want.
. 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 the script as provided would need to upgraded to work in both environments.

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.

Jacque, I wish using ../Documents/Revolution …/Externals was as simple as you say. It really should be: put your external in, restart rev, done, dusted, sorted. But no, you still have to write script in each new stack to point to each External individually. And that script has to handle the differences in IDE and standalone processing (for those going to standalones). Do what I suggest, and you have nothing else to while in the IDE and you can handle the standalone as a separate entity when you get to there.