Project Manager - Organising forms

[AndrewMozley]

I am using the Project Manager to organise the forms, (and classes, programs &c) which make up a project. At run time I run a specific form by using the command DO FORM myform.

myform.scx is within a folder FORMS which is on the PATH.

There is now quite a large number of forms within the Documents\Forms section of the project, and I would like to organise them within the Project Manager so that they are grouped according to the way that they are selected from my menu at run time.

So I might like to group all the reports together within the project manager. Sadly I have not given the report forms names beginning with the same prefix, which would have grouped them together alphabetically within the project manager.

Is there a way of creating further subfolders within the Documents\Forms tab of the project manager? Or do other programmers have ways of organising forms within the Project Manager.

Thanks. Andrew

 

[Olaf Doschke]

No, you can't organize project manager collections any further, even if you'd put forms in separate folders, in project managers they all are under the root Forms node.
Besides reports and forms are in Documents, but each is in it's own group. The documents section has the root nodes: Forms, Reports, Labels. So that separation of forms and reports is done already without any further subfolders.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Andrew,

Your problem is not unusual. On a recent project, I had 114 forms to work with, and my Project Manager had got very cluttered.

My solution is not to rely on the Project Manager during routine development. Like most developers, I tend to work on just one or two forms at a time. To open a form in the Form Designer, I use a DO FORM command from the command window. But of course I don't type the same command over and over. I just click on an earlier instance of the command within the command window; or, failing that, use Intellisense to avoid typing the entire command.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that you should do the same. My point is that the Project Manager does not itself offer any useful way of organising a hierarchy of forms, and so isn't necessarily the best tool for opening forms in the scenario I described.

Mike


__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Olaf Doschke]

You can of course much better organise things in class libraries. That's a good reason to do form classes instead of forms. The inheritance hierarchy isn't shown in a treeview structure anyway, though. The project manager misses some features here, too, you just can collapse and expand a set of classes, a library. Some people only put one class into one lib for some reasons, then it will not reduce the number of root elements.

One thing to organise stuff further is using the component gallery, which I don't do myself, though. It's also more about organizing stuff on a general level, not per project.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Mike Lewis]

This might be a good project for an unemployed community-minded FoxPro developer wanting to keep busy. It shouldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility to create a custom project manager, which would include most of the features of the native version, plus a folder structure for the individual objects.

Maybe it's already been done?

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Well, no need to reinvent the wheel, though a PJX also is just another extension for DBF.

Nothing hinders you to create a secondary PJX and only pull in some of the forms.
For building you just need the one complete PJX, but you can have forms in many projects.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Freeman]

And maybe while enhancing the PM you could add multi-user features?

It was done. It was a product released by Flash Creative Management in the early 90s. And it was abandoned shortly thereafter because it was an absolute beast of a product to work on.

 

[TamarGranor]

Check out the Finder project on VFPX. Thought it wasn't created to replace the Project Manager, Rick Schummer quickly realized it could be used that way, and it's been enhanced to serve as a PM replacement.

Tamar

 

[Mike Lewis]

Good point, Tamar. I completely forgot about that.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[ggreen61]

I have written a full replacement of the standard VFP Project Manager (I have my own extension for the project file - GKK; although, it still uses the standard project files). It does not provide a means to group the forms under the "Forms" group; however, you could add this capability if you are interested (I will provide a link to download the source if you are). Here is a screen shot of a project:

 

[AndrewMozley]

Thank you all - Olaf, Mike L, Dan and Tamar.

And particularly ggreen; I would like to experiment with your Project Manager Replacement. Is there a means by which you can send the information to me? I realise that Spam is a problem, but am happy to provide an email address - is that allowed? Or can you provide a link?

regards. Andrew

 

[Mike Lewis]

Andrew,

The management does not allow the posting of email addresses in the forum. But Ggreen is free to post a link for downloading the code. In any case, that's a better solution, because it means that other forum members can share the code - assuming, of course, that he is happy to do that.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[ggreen61]

Andrew / All--

Here is a link via Dropbox:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4750866/GKKProjectManager-07Apr2015.zip

The main project form is "GKPProjectDock.scx" and this is where you would do most (if not all) changes. The standard PJX file is read and converted to a GKK format project file. The PJX is retained (and updated) for the build command to work. Take a look at the OpenProject() method in the main form. This method reads the GKK table and loads the project for edit. I also use a file type which has #DEFINE for each type (see GKPDefines.h). As the GKK table is read, the DisplayProjectItem() method is called to display it in the TreeView. All the files are prefixed with 'GKP' in order to have VFP not collide user file names with GKKProjectManager file names contained in the APP.

There is a check-out/in function for the project manager for multi-users by placing the GKK on a share location. This may have some bugs in it as I do not use this functionality and I performed limited testing. So it may not be robust yet... Otherwise I have been using this replacement project manager for a number of years now (see the file gkpreleasenotes.rtf for some history which has not been maintained for a quite some time).

I would suggest adding a new file type to the GKK file project for the various categories/groups of Forms. This would be first read and added to the TreeView to establish the nodes. These could then be project specific. You would need to add a method to add these groups -- suggest using the Right-Click menu which is already being used but you could extend it.

Also, there is one other ActiveX that is included - CMAX40.DLL (CodeMax) which I have an unlimited license to use (written by WinMain which is no longer in business but gave me unlimited access to it); you will need to manually register it. The CodeMax ActiveX is used in the search UI for displaying the search results. I don't think there are any other ActiveX dependencies outside of those that come with VFP (i.e., MS TreeView, ComboBox, FlexGrid, ListView - from what I remember...).

If you have any questions, please post a new message thread with the GKKProjectManager in the title and I will respond; but please note that I only occasionally check this forum.