DO12 - dialog resources

Help & Support
6

@Greg, no I don't remember! o) I tried to translate with google, did not make any sense for me. o)

Now back to the initial topic:
I wonder why you chose to append the dialog resources to script files.
I see several disadvantages with this:

  • js/vbs syntax breaks
    External editor may choke heavily with plain text appended to valid source code.
    I'm thinking of:

    • non-working syntax highlighting
    • non-working code validation with built in or external tools (running script.exe e.g.)
    • non-working code beautifiers and minimizers
    • you lose the "hacky" option to include and eval() other scripts
    • you cannot run DO scripts out of DOs context, which works perfectly right now (cscript.exe)

  • editing and maintaining script dialog resources is not possible without headaches

    • you now need to copy and paste xml snippets back and forth continuously from the dialog editor

  • scripts cannot share or reuse dialogs (in dialog tabs e.g.)

  • scripts cannot modify/create/extend dialog xml files directly

    This is for people who'd like to go crazy with dialogs. Embedded resources cannot be created by scripts itself. So there's no way to change a dialogs layout or add controls dynamically directly from a script. Example: You cannot add x many checkboxes if you need them, which is something the current "standard" dialogs can do to some extend. Another usecase is to install or publish dialogs by scripts on demand.

Maybe this all is still subject to change and you plan to also support external dialog resources?
To wrap this up, I really see only advantages with external resources and can't think of something that would add inconvenience.

  • you don't break script syntax, allowing validation, code formatters and modifiers to work as expected
  • you give scripts control on dialog layout and number of elements
  • scripts can share or extend dialogs
  • you don't lose embedded dialogs, just wrap them in proper multiline string code
  • dialog resources within external xml files matches the way DO stores other settings and configurations perfectly
  • dialog resources could be downloaded, shared or updated separatly
  • quick changes to dialog resources could be done in any editor, providing decent xml validation
  • loading/saving external resources into the new dialog editor would be possible as well, avoiding copy & paste orgies

Thanks for your attention, opinions appreciated.