« See you in San Diego … | Home | MBS Filemaker Plugin,… »

Wishes for little plug-in additions?

There are a lot of little additions we could do. Like for example tag properties and parameters which you can use to store references to your own objects if needed. For example for GameKit we have added tag parameters to several methods which later call an event. This way you can pass any reference value with the method to have it in the event. For example if you run several times the same query, you can later in the event see which query the result belongs to. Do you need another tag property or parameter somewhere?

There are several cases where you pass raw data between functions. Now sometimes you use a string like if you read bytes from a binarystream. In other cases you use a memoryblock, like for webfile class. Now we have a lot of functions which take data or return data. A lot of are already overloaded so you can pass both memoryblock and string and the plugin takes both. This avoids extra conversion. Do you need somewhere a function to return string/memoryblock or take it?

There are convenience functions we can add. For example we just added in 13.0 plugins a method CIImageMBS.AsNSImageMBS to quickly convert from CIImage to NSImage. This avoids a few extra steps. With 13.1 plugins we also add CIImageMBS.imageFromPicture to convert a picture to CIImageMBS quickly. Those convenience functions can save time and make coding easier. Can you think about methods you could need to make your live easier?

For our SQL classes we added in 13.0 plugins methods to get RecordSet from SQLCommandMBS or SQLConnectionMBS objects. This helps for using our SQL classes with some methods taking RecordSets like the reporting classes.

So if you have ideas for little helper functions, methods or properties, please do not hesitate to suggest something.
14 02 13 - 19:29