App Battles ! Winner takes all. Last man standing and all that !
No – nothing quite so fun (although it can be a lot of fun)
This has to do with the App class at design time vs the App METHOD (yes it’s a method) at runtime.
The app class at design time can be renamed however you want.… Read the rest
When using the “factory” pattern you should only be able to get a valid instance from the factory and NO other way. Thats kind of the point of the pattern – to reduce the number of points at which instances can be created. Normally in Xojo you might have a module with a method that can create instances, and its the only one allowed to do this.… Read the rest
An interesting question came up on the forums the other day about how to mimic “Unions” from C.
Turns out I had answered this some time ago – its close but not exactly the same as in C. But it is close enough to be functional and close enough for most uses.
And it’s not mentioned anywhere in the Xojo docs.… Read the rest
A recent feedback case made me think that there may be a real lack of information about attributes.
A lot of people believe that attributes are key value pairs that must have a valid identifier as the NAME and ALWAYS have a quoted string for a value.
This is incorrect.
Attribute name can be quoted strings – meaning you can, by using a quoted string for the name – have names that include spaces that would normally be invalid.… Read the rest
Thomas Templemann wrote a nice blog post about his preferred coding style guidelines.
And most I absolutely agree with.
Except one.
His suggested style is to test booleans simply for the value they hold and not to test for TRUE or FALSE explicitly. He considers testing for TRUE or FALSE bad style. Examples of bad style are :
if hidden = true then ...Currently when you call a method in Xojo the parameters are matched up starting from the first to the last from left to right. They are matched up based on their position in the argument list.
One thing some other languages support is “named parameters”.
What this allows is a certain degree of flexibility that doesn’t exist with positional parameters like Xojo uses.… Read the rest
For anyone not using version control perhaps the easiest way to share code between various projects is to use external items. However, not everything cam be made external. Modules that contain classes & other modules cant be shared via external items.
So how can you share these ?
On macOS the answer is … ALIASES !!!!!… Read the rest
Back when I wrote Code for Safety I gave one example of something that I’m sure we’ve all done from time to time. Saving the state of some flag and then returning and having possibly multiple places to reset the flag we saved.
There’s another thats is more common with the advent of HiDPI support for Windows; drawing in a listbox event like CellBackGroundPaint Saving the graphics state, disabling antialiasing, and then needing to restore that state.… Read the rest
When you create a custom control from a canvas, container control or some other base class its not unusual to use raise event to create new events like “BeforeButtonPressed”, “AfterButtonPressed” or to just make it so you;r control can implement normal events like Open, Close, etc and pass then along.
You’ll see code using raiseevent to cause these events to be raised on any instances.… Read the rest
A lot of times when you need to create a menu at runtime you don’t know the number of items and those items may require some additional data to be handled correctly like a folder item, window reference etc. And in cases like this a subclass of MenuItem makes sense so you can add properties to the subclass and implement the action event to handle that extra data.… Read the rest