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[Bryce S.]

Hi,

Fantastic product.
It took a while to tee it all up in our environment but we're now using Studio v3 and I'm really enjoying the experience, especially the graphical debugger.
Now, in case Santa's elves are listening here is my wish list for enhancements next year.
If you agree with any please send your own thumbs up, or if it is already possible and I've missed it let me know how it is done.

1. All our function names are known across all our modules (they show up within the 'auto-complete'), can we have ability to highlight these in a different colour in the code editor?

2. When my schema is known to a project, can we have ability to highlight table names and column names in a different colour in the code editor?

3. Can the scope of bookmarks be limited to the current file or current project please? 
   I can open a number of projects in a week, if I don't remove the bookmarks before closing a project, when I'm trying to jump between bookmarks in some other project I find files from all sorts of different projects are remembered and opened out of place. (maybe that is a bug?).

Regarding the above colouring requests, we have had this type of highlighting for years in our old editor and have grown accustomed to it and like it for ease of reading and seeing what is going on at a glance.
So the above requests have 5 votes from the developers here, anyone else...

Happy holidays everyone from down under,
 regards, 
    Bryce Stenberg
    (Harness Racing New Zealand Inc.)

[Reuben B.]

Can the scope of bookmarks be limited to the current file or current project please? 
   I can open a number of projects in a week, if I don't remove the bookmarks before closing a project, when I'm trying to jump between bookmarks in some other project I find files from all sorts of different projects are remembered and opened out of place. (maybe that is a bug?).

it is working as designed.  Look beneath %APPDATA% and you will see bookmarks.conf that is used to store the bookmark info, which you can also view with Window->Views->Bookmarks.

There is a request GST-9026 to consider a per project view of bookmarks.

You may also be interested if you aren't aware of Edit->Goto->Symbol Definition which if you highlight a variable or function, press the appropriate accelerator for your platform will take you to the definition.  To navigate backwards then you hit the back button in the toolbar. 

[Reuben B.]

1. All our function names are known across all our modules (they show up within the 'auto-complete'), can we have ability to highlight these in a different colour in the code editor?

2. When my schema is known to a project, can we have ability to highlight table names and column names in a different colour in the code editor?
...
Regarding the above colouring requests, we have had this type of highlighting for years in our old editor and have grown accustomed to it and like it for ease of reading and seeing what is going on at a glance.

how does your existing code editor know what is in the schema and what is a function?

To see how the colouring works, find beneath APPDATA the files default.conf and user.conf.  Hopefully you can tie the entries there to what is in Preferences views.

Find beneath GSTDIR the directory lexerproperties and note the files in that directory.  Note how 4gl.xml has one set of keywords whilst a language such as asm has multiple sets of keywords in its equivalent file. 

You might be able to get what you want by editing 4gl.xml to add extra keyword sets... but this will also give you an idea of potential difficulties of putting something that is Genero specific into a code editor that handles multiple languages i.e it is using a static list rather than something that is dynamic.

You may get something to close to what you want simply by going into Preferences and changing color for "IDENTIFIERS" to differentiate more between those and KEYWORDS, NUMBERS, STRINGS, OPERATORS etc

[Bryce S.]

2. When my schema is known to a project, can we have ability to highlight table names and column names in a different colour in the code editor?
...

You might be able to get what you want by editing 4gl.xml to add extra keyword sets... but this will also give you an idea of potential difficulties of putting something that is Genero specific into a code editor that handles multiple languages i.e it is using a static list rather than something that is dynamic.

You may get something to close to what you want simply by going into Preferences and changing color for "IDENTIFIERS" to differentiate more between those and KEYWORDS, NUMBERS, STRINGS, OPERATORS etc

I've finally had a chance to play around with this.  It would be easy to add all our database table and column identifiers as well as function names to the 4gl.xml as extra keyword sets, it is essentially what we do with previous editor - we update the static file every time we copy code to production.

Adding extra keyword sets had promise, but since all the sets get lumped together under IDENTIFIERS it still doesn't quite cut it, I end up with too many items all of the same colour so don't get any visual advantage.

Now if the 'preferences -> code editor -> color & font' could look at the xml file for each language, see there are multipe keyword sets and offer me colour choice for each set then that would work dandy.
How hard would that be to add to studio?

Regards,
  Bryce Stenberg.

[Reuben B.]

Now if the 'preferences -> code editor -> color & font' could look at the xml file for each language, see there are multipe keyword sets and offer me colour choice for each set then that would work dandy.
How hard would that be to add to studio?

isn't that what it does?  Look at the configuration files for the various C and Java  language .xml files in the lexerproperties directory and note how they have multiple keyword sets that appear in preferences ->code editor -> color & font.  What I haven't found is the configuration file that has the relationship between the various Keyword sets uniquely referenced by KeywordID="<integer>" in the lexerproperties*.xml file, and the KEYWORD name as it appears in user.conf

[Bryce S.]

Now if the 'preferences -> code editor -> color & font' could look at the xml file for each language, see there are multipe keyword sets and offer me colour choice for each set then that would work dandy.
How hard would that be to add to studio?

isn't that what it does?  Look at the configuration files for the various C and Java  language .xml files in the lexerproperties directory and note how they have multiple keyword sets that appear in preferences ->code editor -> color & font.  What I haven't found is the configuration file that has the relationship between the various Keyword sets uniquely referenced by KeywordID="<integer>" in the lexerproperties*.xml file, and the KEYWORD name as it appears in user.conf

Hi Reuben,

I see the other languages you mention have 'KEYWORD' AND 'KEYWORD II' in 'color & font' that seems to match with the two keyword sets in the xml file.
However, when I add other '<Set KeywordID=..' sections to my '<KeywordSets>' in the 4gl.xml file I still only get the one 'KEYWORD' option in 'color & font'.

I did find that 'generostudio-default.conf' file has the KEYWORD, KEYWORD II stuff but adding an extra line with the next token number (??) for 4gl had no effect.

So, like you said "What I haven't found is the configuration file that has the relationship between the various Keyword sets  uniquely referenced by KeywordID="<integer>" - this is something I need appear to need, so that the number of KeywordSets in the xml gets populated through to 'color & font' preference settings. Any further ideas on that?

Regards, Bryce.

[Reuben B.]

Just to summarise, after discussions with Support.

GST-9026 - per project view of bookmarks. 
GST-12986 - be able to add extra keyword sets and enable different colours (same as for some other languages the code editor supports)

If anyone would use these, please contact your support contact and get your name added to the list of requestors.

Reuben