Demo Show Stopper - Save File Dialog

David Burgun dburgun at dsl.pipex.com
Mon Apr 26 16:05:48 EDT 2004


Hi,



>Your absolutely right - without question, RR should fix this issue.  I guess
>I'm more lenient about small issues like this.

Unfortunately, I (and more importantly the people that pay my salary 
and buy licenses for tools like RunRev) don't see this as a small 
issue! It has to do with Stack/Save integrity and the status of 
whether something has been saved or not.

I am not so worried that RR haven't fixed it, I am more worried that 
having got the Stack file into a state that causes this to happen, 
that no one seems to know what to do to undo it!

As I see it there are two issues:

1.  The fact that the IDE lets the Stack (or, more correctly, lets 
the user get the Stack) into a state where this happens. This does 
need looking at by RR. There do seems to be many holes in the IDE 
where things like this can happen.

2.  The fact that now that it has happened, there seems to be no tool 
or method for fixing it. At the very least just knowing what the 
*exact* test that causes the dialog to appear would help. Also the 
*exact* conditions that cause "Edited" to be set as the Stack State 
would be nice. Source code would be even better.


If and when I do find a fix for this, I will (maybe with the help of 
others on this list??) produce a Stack or at least some documentation 
on how to fix it.
----------------------------------------------------------------

More Clues:

I have been looking back over what I did over the past 7 days or so 
in an effort to re-create the steps that caused this to happen.

This Stack started off life as a Sub-Stack of a multi-stack file. I 
used the "Save in Seperate File" command from the IDE to make it into 
a seperate file. Not sure if this is significant, but every little 
helps, right?

The following could have happened after this.

I renamed the Stack Name Property, I could have done this with the 
Stack or an Object Script open. IOW, I was editing the Stack Script 
and then remembered that I needed to change the Stack Name Property, 
so I called up the Stack Inspector and changed it's name and saved it 
*while* I had an un-applied Edited Stack Script open. Also I may have 
had breakpoints in the Script before I saved it.

The reason I mention this is because in the file compare I did, it 
looked like the differences were to do with script names (not really 
sure what they are), the Stack name (I saw the old StackName in the 
file, although it doesn't appear in any of the script's) and 
breakpoints. All of which I changed just before this started 
happening.

>I have used RR for 3 years now.  I know it well enough to know it's
>stability.  And, I can tell you, in my experience, it's pretty strong.  I'll
>admit that RR's IDE is a bit quirky.  There are some things (like the save
>prompt) you just have to let go by [until RR fixes them].  In my case, I'm
>not so concerned about RR's IDE as I am my final product.  I deploy all my
>products as standalones.  So, I test as a standalone, not in the IDE.  If it
>works as a standalone, then I move on to the next thing I can make money
>with.

Sure, that's fine, but I'm "selling" runrev to the powers that 
be................ If it were something less probematic as this, it 
wouldn't be so bad (you know, like a slider not working 100%), but in 
the case of a Save it just looks bad. The thing is that this Stack is 
the largest of them all, otherwise I'd just have put it all back in 
again by hand! The other statcks are not finished yet.

>I used to work in C++.  The problems I ran into with Metrowerks' IDE and
>their libraries (Not to mention C++ builder - Jeez!!) are FAR more
>devastating and catastrophic than I have ever seen in RR.  And, as an added
>bonus, I write way less code, in literally a fraction of the time!

Yes, me too, but at least with the MW Libs you could put a breakpoint 
and find out what was going on! With this it's something that has 
been set in a file that you can't reset! The eqivilent problem in CW 
would be that the Project file had a setting that was "stuck". In 
this case there were many ways in which you could get back to square 
one, e.g. remove the "data" folder, remove the Prefs file and if all 
else failed, you could always just export the Project file to XML and 
rebuild the project file.

With RR, since the problem is actually inside the file, even if RR 
stop it happening in the IDE in the future, the problem will still be 
around in all the stacks that contain it now!

Is there anyway I can build a new Stack from the Cards of the 
Original Stack? If I do this, will all the Scripts (except for ths 
Stack Script, which I will cut+paste over manually) be kept intact?

I am hoping that the problem is not inside any of the object scripts 
(there are no Card Level Scripts), since I don't have to use alter 
any controls to make this happen.

All the Best
Dave


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