[Hwgui-developers] Few notes about new Designer

[Alexander S.K. <al...@be...>]

Hello All,

 the Designer is fully rewritten and has a number of important
 features.

 1. The controls set is fully configurable. The list of
 controls ( widgets ) is placed in special configuration file with XML
 format. The name of that file is in Designer's ini file
 "Designer.iml", currently it is resource/widgets.xml. To add a new
 control or even a controls set, or add new properties/methods for a
 control is easy now - just edit the widgets.xml. This allows to use
 the Designer not only for HwGUI based, but for any other
 applications - you can create a fully new controls set for your
 purposes.

 2. The Designer can be built not only as standalone program, but
 can be a part of other application where it is needed to edit forms
 at runtime.

 3. The output formats are configurable due to the using of external
 scripts. The native HwGUI format support is included in Designer's
 code, all others are included as plugins.
 Currently there are two plugins - for reading old .frm files (
 resource/f_text.prg ) and for writing the prgs - f_hwgprg.prg ( not
 fully functional yet ).

 4. Designer allows to describe not only properties, but methods, too
 - so the form description is a complete dialog procedure.
 You can read it from a file or from a string ( if you previously
 loaded it to the string from any source ) method and show it on a
 screen:

   oForm := HFormTmpl():Read( "testget1.xml" )
   oForm:Show()

 So, it allows to create really data driven applications.

 There are two sample forms included - testget1.xml and testget1.xml,
 which implements the functionality of samples/testget1.prg and
 samples/testget2.prg.

 Of course, it isn't fully completed - I need to decide how implement
 the tab pages control, how to describe the browse ...
 More controls should be added.
 I plan also to add syntax highliting in the methods editor.
  

Regards,
 Alexander
http://kresin.belgorod.su