By-and-large Xojo is an excellent system. What I miss, when comparing Xojo to other languages (say C for instance) is that the IDE apparently does not allow for editing of a module, class, or other object as a whole.
But I imagine this is possible, for instance with the text version of a project. Can anyone describe how to best go about editing Xojo projects as text files, in say Eclipse, and integrating that process with the Xojo’s compilation and debugging capabilities? Is this possible, and if so, how?
create the project with Xojo, save the project as a text file (you need a paid licence to do that not allowed in the free version)
then edit it with any text editor you want, and compile with Xojo IDE.
There are some IDEs where we do it all the time; switch from visual to code, modify things, switch to visual, and see the modification. We can “touch” many different parts at once before switching back to visual, and if something got inconsistent, the IDE points where it is and you need to fix before going back to visual again. This is called Round-Trip Engineering. All integrated, on-the-fly. Everything blessed by the IDE, with autocomplete, warnings, help, etc.
[quote=455837:@Tom Dowad]By-and-large Xojo is an excellent system. What I miss, when comparing Xojo to other languages (say C for instance) is that the IDE apparently does not allow for editing of a module, class, or other object as a whole.
But I imagine this is possible, for instance with the text version of a project. Can anyone describe how to best go about editing Xojo projects as text files, in say Eclipse, and integrating that process with the Xojo’s compilation and debugging capabilities? Is this possible, and if so, how?[/quote]
Yeah dont
The text file are marked up in a specific way and getting that markup wrong insures your project or module wont load
Plus every time you do this you have to reload the entire project to incorporate whatever changes you made in the external editor
As a user of other tools, I can assure you, it is very useful and highly productive. Every object is presented as text and can be tweaked as necessary to the detail very fast, many of them, at once, visual ones, or not. Everything, not only layouts, can be shown “as code”.
Sure
When Xojo gets around to rewriting the entire way it represents a project in memory I suppose they could represent it some other way so you could edit the code/xml/whatever.
I’m not holding my breath since its been this way for more than 15 years already
Me too, but it won’t deter me of citing a fact or a desire of a known feature in a conversation. It’s not the first time I said that. To be true, I even erased many features from my desire list in the feedback app. Multi-threading in multi cores, round trip engineering, even Android I gave up…
Thanks for the replies. The answers given are about what I expected. Basically, you can do it but its kind of dangerous and tedious.
Why would anyone want to do this? Its a style of programming, and a way of organizing a file to support that. I find when working this way, I can develop a module much more quickly. One spends a lot of time navigating up and down the file, which oddly enough is a form of code review. I organize the files in a sequence that echoes the structure of the code. In any case…it works for me, and it would be great to be able to do that with my Xojo code also.
Can someone tell me, is there a way of organizing the lists of methods, properties, etc in a user-specified order (ie not alphabetically sorted)? It works with lists of objects but I don’t know how to do this with methods, properties, and constants.
