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Re: GUI Form Editor [message #26694 is a reply to message #26692]

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:36

cbpporter
Messages: 1401
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Very interesting! The great part is that it looks good and is exactly what users expect and are used to. The layout editor from TheIDE while very functional is not what user except (as interface I mean).

First, a suggestion about XML. XML is in general free form. You can insert anything in it even if it has no logical structure, like adding a color property to something that has no color. Also, there are a few conventions that are used in most XML based standards, including W3C. Basically:

<name>Noname</name>

is the recommended form for a name/value pair, and:

<property name="Variable" value="Cancel"/>

is not. It is better to express the previous statement as:

<variable>Cancel</variable>

What you are doing with your properties tag is using XML not to store free form data, but to store a data that has to be in that specific tag format and the format must be apparent in the XML. This is just a suggestion, you can of course leave it as it is.

And second, while this editor great, it would be more useful if you could edit ".lay" files so the forms can be used as templates in the code. After that, patching TheIDE to use this editor would be trivial.

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