Bug report for v 4.82

[fqvarfort]

Hi,

I had some time messing around with LB Workshop 4.81 when working with my little Grid contest entry at the LB ConForums forum. I found some bugs, though you wanna hear them. These are for 4.81, I don't know what you may have corrected since then.

• Help > Optional Help File ... -> Select CANCEL -> Error message "The chose Helpfile was not found" -> new Open Dialog -> Select CANCEL again -> Same error message, then stops asking -> Then "No helpfile is designated.", should just keep quiet after i CANCEL the first time.
  
  
• Help > Optional Help File... -> In the Open Dialog maybe you could add (.hlp) to the Filter combobox, as .chm are also a HelpFile but not supported. Just so the user knows that he's looking for a .hlp file.
  
  
• Options > Paths > Optional Helpfile Path: Click BROWSE... > Click CANCEL and the error message "The Chosen Helpfile was not found" error is presented, should do nothing, just cancel the browse.
  
  
• Options > Paths > The Optional Helpfile Path was not loaded into the edit box when I had already set it using the Help > Optional Help File... menu, but when I clicked Browse... and then CANCEL'd, the name of the helpfile was shown.
  
  
• Help > Liberty Basic HELP -> Click CANCEL -> Gives you TWO error messages, should just be quiet. When I looked into the Options dialog after I did this, the entry for Liberty Basic Help File was empty, as in"", not "no path" as the rest of the "empty" paths.
  
  
• Shortcuts: If I create a shortcut to a .BAS file and put the name of the .BAS file inside " (quote) quaracters, I get an error message saying "Bad file name or number.". A new window is created for the file though and a new item is added to the File > Recent Files List. The contents of the window is empty though.
  
  
• Shortcuts II: If I try to re-open the incorrect file in the File > Recent Files List, the program CRASHes.
  
  
• When a file is saved, the file is appending by a Chr$(9) - TAB - character. Open a file, save it, and voila you got a file with 3 bytes of data, 2 bytes for the new line character I can understand but the TAB character? This also happens *every* time you save a file, it appends a TAB character on the last line.
  
  
• Find/Replace: Replace 'Updates' with 'ssssssssUpdates' (where sssss.. is anything that contains more characters the 'Updates' string) gets you into an infinite loop. Easy way of confirming this is opening a new empty document, enter Hello. Move the cursor to the beginning of the document. Now Find/Replace 'Hello' to 'HejsanHello'.
  
  
• File > Save Project: If you save your file into a different folder than the .BAS file you have 'Include'd into your project, they do not get included into the project file.
  
  
• File > Open: The user doesn't warn or stop you from opening a file twice. You can open file in two windows, and mess around with them at the same time. You can also save two windows with the same filename.
  
  
• Options > Preferences: Changing the setting "Indentation Guides On" or "Auto Indent" affects the panel (the gray area to the left in the editor where the line numbers are, the panel shrunks to about half the size in width. This gets restored when you press ENTER in the editor.
  

The following are not neccessarily bugs, but might work as suggesstions for future improvements

• Include: When including a file that contains GLOBAL statements the GLOBAL statements should be added to the beginning of the running/project file. This is neccessary because otherwhise LB won't create them properly. I found this problematic when I was trying to include 5 files where 3 of them contained GLOBAL variables. I did a quick workaround by splitting the 3 files into 6 files, all GLOBAL's into one file and all SUBS into one file, for each file, and then include all the files in the correct order, but it would probably be easier if the Include statement fixed this. If you do not want to break backward compatibility maybe a second optional parameter to the include statement would work, or maybe a new function like IncludeSmart or something.
  
  
• Include again: Include statements should work recursively, that is if i Include A.BAS and in that A.BAS I have a line that sais "'Include B.BAS'", both A.BAS and B.BAS ought to be included.
  
  
• Ctrl+H doesn't seem to be used for anything, might be a good suggestion to use it for Replace (as it is in MS Word).
  
  
• Preferences Dialog: A useful option feature would be "AutoSave all files on compile/debug".
  

Enjoy!

[Alyce Watson]

Hello Frederick,

Thanks very much for the thoughtful comments. I will refer to them when I do the next update.

Regarding the 'include feature... I know that it is very limited. The helpfile does tell you that included files must be in the same directory.

Perhaps a totally different project management system would be in order -- something similar to the project methods in Assist. I have avoided improvements to the 'include/projects features so as not to compete with Assist.

Files are automatically saved to disk when you choose to run or debug code. They have to be written to disk to be run in Liberty BASIC. From the helpfile topic "Liberty BASIC Tools":

Liberty BASIC Workshop never automatically over-writes source code files. It is necessary to write a copy of the code to disk for running in Liberty BASIC. This file is written with the same filename as the loaded file, but with the BAK extension. This disk file is created for RUN, MAKE TKN and DEBUG with Liberty BASIC.

Again, thanks very much for the feedback. It is appreciated.

[fqvarfort]

Just to clarify.. The problem I was having with saving a file containing Include'd subfiles, into a different folder. This was when I saved a *project* file, which I understand is the file that you may need when distributing your finished product or just want to emigrate to another program that doesnt support the Include command. I understand that you can not have the Include'd files in a different folder in ordinary files, since you can not use paths in the Include command, but when you create/save a project it might be better to search the source folder for the Included files, instead of the destination folder.