On 21/09/08 at 08:30 -0700 Joe Lewis Wilkins apparently wrote:
I guess this is my day for confusion. (smile) I'm not using a player for any of this.

I have a fairly simple stack consisting of some 50 cards, each of which has one or more images and some fields and/or buttons. Using the bucket tool, a user may color inside the lines of the images as they see fit - often pretty complex. Once colored, they may print portions of the cards that I designate in the print routine; but, once the stack is closed, all of these colorations disappear. I would like for them to be able to Save a copy of the colorized stack under a new name, as a document?, from the standalone. Then, as you have indicated it can, have that copy open as a document "of" the standalone when double clicked upon. So far, I've used:

Joe,

I believe your confusion arises from not realizing that in order to accomplish what you want and others suggest, you need to change the paradigm, well, design of your program. It appears, you keep the code (program scripts) and the data (images, fields, and whatever) in the same stack file. When you use this in IDE, all is fine. However, when you create a standalone using this stack as the program, your standalone is both the program and the data file. Since it can't modify itself when used, you run into a problem. To get out of this concodrum, you need to separate the program from the data. You can use a few approaches:

Simplest to implement is to keep your program pretty much as it is but add a launcher stack which can display only a splash and then call your stack. When creating a standalone, you create it using only the splash stack, keeping your work-horse stack as a stack. In this mode, there is no problem to save the changes. What can be problematic is handling the upgrades if your program is being distributed to users.

Note that if you don't care about branding your program, you can use the StackRunner instead of your own splash-stack-standalone.

A variation of this is to use your splash stack as a library, that is move as much of coding to it as possible, with only minimal scripts in the data stack, which all call your library functions to do the actual work. This way, your data stacks may require none or little changes when the program changes.

On the other extreme is to keep the data, that is whatever users enters, changes, in a separate file, possibly a stack but this is not required, which has no programming code whatsoever. Your program simply uses it as a repository of user data, recalling it as needed in the display/work program. This approach allows you to have a true document-like behaviour, that is users can keep and save the data-stack files anywhere and you can even go as far as to have them open by double-clicking.

Robert
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