Standalone problem

[J. Landman Gay]

On 5/13/12 11:22 PM, dunbarx at aol.com wrote:

> Jacque. If I do not include a full pathname to the external in the
> stack inspector, neither the IDE stack nor the standalone will
> work.The external is not seen unless I go through the process form
> the "external references" pane, navigating to the external.

That's probably the problem. Since the bundle isn't in the standalone, 
the external is being loaded from the full file path on the hard drive, 
which will be different on another machine.

The bundle must be copied into the standalone bundle. You can do that by 
manually moving it into either the MacOS folder (or the MacOS/Externals 
folder) after the standalone is built. Or you can use the Copy Files 
pane to include it, and it will go next to the engine in the bundle.

In the stack property inspector, set the externals to one of:

   myexternal.bundle
   Externals/myexternal.bundle

depending on where you put it.

Now, this will fail in the IDE, so during development you'd need to 
point it to your copy on disk, and then change it before building a 
standalone to one of the short file paths above. Because that's a 
hassle, I usually don't use the inspector, I use a script. You can only 
load externals in a preOpenStack handler, so I do this:

on preOpenStack
   if the environment = "standalone application" then
     set the externals of this stack to "myExternal.bundle"
   end if
end preOpenStack

Or use "Externals/myExternal.bundle" if you copied it there instead.

Then also put your external into the Externals folder in the My LiveCode 
folder (or whatever you've named it; the same one that holds your 
plugins) and the IDE should load the external automatically on startup. 
If you don't already have an Externals folder in there, create one. That 
way you don't need to place a reference into the stack inspector, the 
external will already be available globally in the IDE. If you load it 
that way in the IDE, and use the script to handle the standalone 
instance, then both bases are covered.

Yet another way is to branch the script:

if the environment = "standalone application" then
   set the externals of this stack to "myExternal.bundle"
else if the environment = "development" then
   set the externals of this stack to <full filepath to external>
end if

Hopefully something in all that will help...

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