How to loop through stacks with same name?

[Håkan Liljegren]

When my students turn in their assignments all their individual stacks usually have the same name. If I try to loop through all of them there seems to be no way to close one stack and move on to the next one (with the same name) without getting the dialog asking if I want to save, purge or cancel the previous stack?!

I have tried to:

close stack tStack
delete stack tStack

That didn't work

I then thought that it might be that the IDE needed some more time to clean up so I added a loop:
delete stack tStack
repeat while tStack is among the lines of the openStacks
   wait for 100 milliseconds with messages
end repeat

That didn’t work either as the next time I try to open a stack with the same name I get the dialog again

I then thought that maybe the handler needs to be finished before the cleanup is done so I tried to rewrite using a system where I added all files that should be crawled into a local variable and added the current stack into another and created a system using the send command:

local sFileList              # A text with one file path per line for all files that should be crawled 
local sCurrentStack    # The name of the currently crawled stack

on stackCrawl
   if sCurrentStack is among the lines of the openstacks then
      send “stackCrawl” to me in 500 milliseconds
   else if sCurrentStack is not empty then
      # Now we now that the sCurrentStack is not among the open stacks (I.e closed and deleted)
      put empty into sCurrentStack
      if sFileList is empty then
         # All stacks crawled => We are finished!
      else
         send “stackCrawl” to me in 0 milliseconds
      end if
   else # sCurrentStack is empty so we should move on to the next stack in the file list!
      put line 1 of sFileList into tFile
      delete line 1 of sFileList
      put the openStacks into tStackList
      open stack tFile
      repeat for each line aStack in the openStacks
         if aStack is not among the lines of tStackList then
            put aStack into sCurrentStack
            exit repeat
         end if
      end repeat    
      # Do needed operations on sCurrentStack
      delete sCurrentStack
     send “stackCrawl” to me in 500 milliseconds
   end if
end stackCrawl
     
This also gives the same result. Then I realised that the stacks I have also have sub stacks so I also tried:

      put the substacks of stack sCurrentStack into tSubStacks
      lock messages
      repeat for each line tSubStack in tSubstacks
         close stack tSubStack
      end repeat
      delete stack sCurrentStack
      unlock messages

I even found a call to revIDEHandleObjectDeleted by peeking into the IDE itself. Added a call to that function but still no luck!

Even if I loop through all my stacks (by clicking purge for each stack) and then do a "put the openStacks” I can see that the last stack is not among the the open stacks. But, if I now try to open the first stack in the list again I still get a dialog asking me about what I want to do with the last stack in the list (save, purge or cancel)!

So as soon as a stack I opened via script there is no way to close it via script and also remove it from the internal workings of the IDE. Is there ANY way to really delete the stack from the IDE memory so I can open a stack with the same name without a dialog popping up?!

I’ve reported this as a bug (https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=24163), but is still interested if anyone has at least a workaround…