ByRef and Optional parameter keywords munged by IDE 2018r1

General
1

This is a caution regarding the new 2018r1 IDE munging parameter lists during global edit changes.
Hopefully, this warning saves someone else some work.

If you have the keywords ByRef or Optional in a parameter list, your parameters will get munged during global text replacements that alter your parameter list.

For instance. In the IDE, you do a text change from “dummyClass” to “cDummy”

Parameter lists with…

become

Note the newly missing space after byRef.

Omission of that trailing space after ByRef or Optional can make a tedious mess if you have a lot of methods altered.
This bug also munges ALL the byREF’s and optionals whether or not the immediately following parameter was changed.

If you are doing a big renaming of classes and constants, this adds a lot of fixup work. I was updating an old project to more consistent naming conventions when I ran into this. Added a couple hours to what should have been a quick project.

Feedback 52140 has been submitted to Xojo

2

wouldn’t a temp workaround be :

note : workaround to save hours of manual work… unless this too “munges” things up…

At the risk of getting flamed… with all the “bugs” cropping up since the release of 2018r1, I’m questioning the QA process

3

Ugh. Tried something like that. Things still got re-munged.

Because this seems to affect things even if a different parameter is changed, I think the IDE is doing the following…

Parse apart the parameter list and re-synthesizes a new one during the text replace.
After the parsing, our explicit space doesn’t exist.
When the IDE puts back together a parameter list, they forget to add a space after the “byRef” and “optional” keywords.