Push Card

Bob Sneidar bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com
Tue Oct 22 14:28:59 EDT 2019



> On Oct 22, 2019, at 11:01 , Andrew Bell via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> I learned HyperCard in K-12 during the '90s and moved to LiveCode a couple years ago. My coding efficiency and strategies have developed considerably over my past couple projects. I don't make a new card for everything, but easily end up with a dozen cards in a stack for most projects.
> 
> Are you saying that LC is better suited to just throw everything onto 1 card then turn on&off the visibility of groups/etc.?
> 
> --Andrew Bell

Not at all. 

Hypercard was designed so that people with no database knowedge whatsoever could nevertheless store and search for information quickly and easily by first storing information on "cards", and then having a very robust full text indexing engine (quite advanced for it's time too) so that finding that information would be bearably fast. 

The trouble came in when people began to discover that at around 2000 cards, things began to slow down, and stacks began to experience corruption. I think they eventually discovered that Hypercard needed time to do some housecleaning, and rapid continuous writes kept it from doing that. 

LC is optimized (not sure that's the right term for it) to use cards like forms, and then populate those "forms" with data from other sources like databases, arrays, files etc. I have 15 stacks in my current project, and all but the main stack only have one card. 

I could have simply created 15 cards, but then the size of each card is different, and what each stack does is anything from slightly different to radically different, so having multiple stacks helps me keep all that organized. Also, each stack (I call them modules) can be open simultaneously with others, like the customer stack and the devices stack for example, which I could not do with a single stack and multiple cards. 

It sounds tempting at first to have groups that get shown and hidden on a single card, but keeping these groups organized, selecting groups under other groups, copying and pasting between groups etc. will quickly cure you of that approach. 

Bob S





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