Getting Started Questions

[saratogacoach]

Hi,

Successfully installed Studio 3.5 on Vista 64 bit OS Windows yesterday. RunRev is a fantastic program with enormous capabilities!

Eventually, after much learning, hope to use RunRev for a diagram drawing app that was previously and limitedly developed in another program. Am hopeful that this is possible.

It will be helpful for me to learn RunRev keeping the future app's features in mind:

This future app needs to let the user draw their family tree to record and display family health history (family health pedigree/genogram).

It requires

(1) inserting images or cloning shapes (shape symbols=squares for male family members, circles for female family members), (2) ability to drag and drop these symbols wherever needed on the diagram, (3) drawing lines (solid, dotted, plain, arrow-headed, etc.) to connect symbols, (4) inserting text labels (input fields) wherever needed, (5) ability to save the diagram (symbol/line/text positions, characteristics, etc.) hopefully in a text file and (6) ability to re-open the diagram so the user can edit, change, delete, add to the diagram and re-save.


A big challenge for a newbie, but the project is to help educate students in the helping fields, like counselors, social workers, and for others, to help them improve health and wellness by knowing their family health history, done as a community service.

But, component by component, piece by piece, I hope to build it.

I would much appreciate feedback on how this app and features can be developed in RunRev. And, learning best by examples, any leads and, hopefully, a sample of a basic component feature that shows how to achieve this diagram drawing.

Kind Regards,

[jmburnod]

Hi,

Good project
I think you can do that you describe with revolution

All the best

Jean-Marc

[Mark]

Dear saratogacoach ,

Your project seems doable with Revolution.

I would like to give a little bit of advice. You mention you would like to save data in text files. If you want to save diagrams, you might want to save the documents for your programme as stacks, the same way I do with Strõm.

Provide the user with options to save or export the files in different formats, while keeping the default format a stack. It is relatively easy to export data from a stack to a text file or to save a card as a picture file. You can even offer at least 3 different picture formats without additional effort. It is very difficult to rebuild a stack from a text file,though, and it is impossible to rebuild it from a picture file. That's why I'd keep the original data in your stack, as graphic and image objects, fields, buttons, et cetera.

Check out the stackFiletype property. It is very useful to change this when saving stacks as documents outside the IDE.

I can also recommend to just start the project and solve problems along the way. Naturally, you can always ask here...

Good luck with your project.

Mark

[saratogacoach]

Hi, Thanks Jean-Marc for your encouragement.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your valuable suggestion. I'm a little too new (just completed first video tutorial a few minutes ago) to understand how to save diagram data into stacks, instead of text, but from a look at your Strom site, you are an expert at this.

I found, using other programs, that one of the major challenges in family diagram making (pedigree/genogram) is being able to name user-inserted objects, get their position, angle, other display characteristics (more advanced: for example, if they changed the fill color to symbolize a specific health condition) and save all of these so that when the user next-time opens the diagram, it is completely reconstructed and editable. (Whew! Just thinking about this is overwhelming!)

Allowing the user to draw connecting lines (sometimes at angles when 2 symbols are on different planes), save and re-open these is another big challenge. And dragging symbols, text labels, drawing lines probably involves complex scripts, because the same mouse down cannot be used to drag, select, edit, delete unless these are somehow made different.

(By the way, I need to try to keep the drawing tool very basic: it is often used as an addition to an eLearning lesson on family health for students who I'm afraid don't spend much time learning how to use these tools.)

So, I have my 'work cut out for me.' I value any suggestions: you have already solved many of these problems in RunRev.

And, if you can share an illustrative rev file that may help me understand how to script basic diagram drawing, I would be very grateful.

Again, thanks for your help.

Kind Regards,

[Simon]

Hi Coach,
In the tool bar of LC there is an icon for "Users Samples", click on that and search for Genealogy, you will find 2 stacks by the same author that you can download and look at the code.
Now it is not a "beginner" stack but I think it has some of what you would like.

Simon

[saratogacoach]

Hi Simon,

It's been a while since I posted the above. However, I am still interested in seeing how this can be accomplished in LC. I'm running 4.6.4 on a Windows 7 machine. When I click on User Samples, log in to Rev Online, search "genealogy" nothing is coming up. Not sure if Rev Online search is working at all for me?

Any other way to locate the 2 genealogy stacks? Can you specify the author's name so I can try to search for the files by author?

Kind Regards,

[Simon]

Wow, I didn't even notice the post date!
I think I know how it ended up in the "New" posts section, must have been a spammer that had their post removed.
The RevOnline thingy is a bit weird, it responds very slow here.

The stack is here as well:
http://livecodeshare.runrev.com/stack/237/Genealogy

Sorry not to have checked the original date.

Simon

[saratogacoach]

Thanks, Simon.

I was able to download and will take a look.

I appreciate your help.

Kind Regards,

saratogacoach