Empty fields and controls after testing

[Richard Gaskin]

Admin wrote:

> One thing that truly bugs the hell out of me with Live Code is that
> when I am done designing/programming and want to test it, the data is
> now a part of the program.

In most applications architectures it's common to separate data storage 
from the user interface, making it easier to update the UI without 
affecting the user's data.

To use such an approach you would load the data from a file and set the 
values of controls used to display the data on preOpenCard (field 
contents, button values, etc.).

With standalones this will be necessary unless you make your UI stack as 
a separate stack file apart from the executable, since modern OSes don't 
allow apps to modify themselves.

Data storage may be a prefs file or a document file, depending on the 
nature of the data.

With LiveCode you have a wide range of formats available.  For large 
tabular data sets you can use SQLite, define your own format using 
simple text files, store arrays using arrayEncode, or even use custom 
properties stored in a stack file (a favorite of mine since it lets me 
use name-value pairs very conveniently.

Sarah Reichelt's helpful article on saving data from a standalone may be 
helpful:
<http://livecodejournal.com/tutorials/saving_data_in_revolution.html>

All that said, we still haven't addressed your central question:  during 
development you'll likely have controls displaying data values that need 
to be cleared - how do we do that?

Since the olden days I've been fond of writing a handler called 
"StripAndShip" which I include in my mainStack, which takes care of 
resetting UI elements to their default states.

In more recent years, the LiveCode IDE now sends a savingStandalone 
message, which can be trapped to handle that sort of stuff for a clean 
build.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv