> On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Keisuke Miyako <[email protected]> wrote: > maybe it's better not to include the seed values as static text in the code > itself.
Is it okay if I agree with you while carrying on what I'm doing ;-) Seriously, your suggestions are spot on and I'd advise anyone following along at home to heed them. So, yes, I find myself surprised that I'm heading down this road. I *hate* finding long screeds of hard-coded text in 4D methods. It's just not a great look, it's virtually impossible to maintain, it's unreadable, etc. But I'm experimenting. I've gotten into some habits and am giving myself more of a clean slate to see what happens. In this particular case, I'm seeding records and then running the cases against the records. For sure, the data could be stored in an external file. That obviously has a couple of small costs and some big advantages. For example, after building you can automatically clear the file and keep it from bloating the distribution. (Assuming this magic file is in the /resources path in the first place.) For what it's worth, this is just a developmental phase. The painful part of starting with a blank slate is that I'm missing a lot of my magic scaffolding. So, I'm building back up piece-by-piece, but with a fresh look. A couple of milestones down the road, I should be generating the predictable test cases automatically and can then run them in memory, write them to disk, write them to records, use them to produce documentation, etc. For now, it's kind of fun to do things the hard way. One of the great things about the hard way is it gives me a good reminder of what I'm trying to simplify. I listen to podcasts while I'm doing boring tasks like yardwork of chopping veggies and lately Tim Harford has been making the rounds in support of his newest book, "Messy": http://timharford.com/books/messy/ I've heard him about three times now and he's great. Lots of good reminders about changing your point of view and giving serendipity a chance to intervene in your life. (I even have one of the early editions of the Oblique Strategies cards he goes on about...although I never did find them that helpful for programming.) Tiny example: Someone spilled coffee on my external keyboard yesterday and it's dead. (Well, not "dead", but to keep using it I'll need to learn a language without the letter "d".) So I rearranged my computer and monitors after many, many years of using them "the way I like them." Guess what, the new arrangement is way better, and I never would have tried it out on my own. Once again, the virtues of coffee cannot be overstated. Just a little reminder of how helpful it can be to do things a bit differently. So, yeah, I'm doing something kind of stupid in my code and enjoying it for a minute. > if you really need to put the string in 4D code, > why not stick "Get text from pasteboard" in the debugger "expression" pane and > save that state. > > just copy whatever text you want to paste in code and open the debugger. > the text in the "value" pane will be ready to take away. Yeah, I did that first...it got old in a hurry. This way I can run a few dozen or hundreds of tests and pretty quickly convert the text as needed for the seed method. But, yeah, it's not an approach with a great future... ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
