StaffDev = success;
Yesterday John and I worked on Vercon. Before, when working on it, we had made quite a bit of progress. The difficult DB and technical portions were basically complete. The primary missing piece was displaying the code in a semi-readable and VERY copiable form. That proved to be an … interesting task.
The initial idea was a textarea. It shows tabs, carriage returns, etc… Seems like just our boy. But the problem is, when dumping the entire contents of a package into a textarea, the inevitability occurs where you use a textarea. The problem occurs when you print the tag from the code it actually close the textarea on the page. Then the rest of the code renders like HTML from there on. What a mess.
So, we tried some HTML tags : , ,
, combinations of the 3 ... all to no avail. Bleah - life was starting to look grim. We had done the 'hard' parts and now were getting hung up on the 'easy' part. On to research. After looking at other people's suggestions - we finally came across a solution (although I had to read it 5 times to realize it WAS the solution).We needed to replace all the 's with & gt;
So we make this function (which only half works ... still) and throw each line through it before throwing it in the textarea. Now it's starting to come together. So being the semi-perfectionist I want it to be perfect. I'm only asking for the world ... how hard is that?
Some links above the textarea allow VERCON users to switch between the spec and body with a simple click of the mouse (only for packages). It's actually cool logic. Then we found some code inconsistencies which we used a clever algorithm to solve. Suddenly we're feeling all kinds of smart and after copying and pasting our output on top of the code, it's found to be identical.
All of this to say that if VERCON makes a backup of your code (which doesn't work yet cuz it's still in test), then you could click the backup date, select all, copy and paste over your code. Instant backup. It's cool, but we still have some work to do. Soon we'll flip on the switch so it'll be doing some real work. Then the real testing begins.
The final, pan ultimate step for VERCON is the hopeful possibility of being able to click a button to overwrite your existing code with the currently viewed backup. This would allow users to instantly switch between code with a mouse click. How's that for backup and recovery? But that's still a ways off. Not to mention that I have 4 StaffDev topics, so VERCON doesn't get as much love as it should. But one day...it'll work too good. And it'll save someone's life (code) - as it did mine already...