[Gambas-user] a wish list

[Rob Kudla]

On Mon January 16 2006 11:31, johnf wrote:
> I know if I want it write some code.  I just don't know a lot
> about C and C++. But I think I have reason to learn.  

I actually think you could implement all three of your wishes 
while writing only Gambas code.

1. You could add that property menu to the IDE, which is written 
in Gambas, and implement it by just prompting the user for a 
property name/type and inserting "PROPERTY xxx AS yyy", "PRIVATE 
prop_xxx AS yyy", "FUNCTION xxx_Read as yyy" and "SUB xxx_Write 
(write_xxx AS yyy)" into the class declaration.  Then, in the 
navigation submenu, you could populate it by looking for 
PROPERTY statements within the class file, and each property's 
corresponding Read and Write methods.

See http://gambasdoc.org/help/lang/propdecl for more on that.

2. There's no reason you couldn't subclass TableView from 
gb.qt.ext for your editable grid control.  I don't know how the 
performance would be, and I think someone might already be 
working on this (or maybe it was just a data-bound grid view), 
but I think it's possible to do in pure Gambas.  I haven't run 
into the need for this myself, but back in the VB days I got 
tired of using proprietary add-on controls like Sheridan 
Datagrid and ended up writing my own control that overlaid a 
floating text box over the appropriate cell and trapped 
keypresses and whatnot to handle cursor movement, editing, etc.  
I think this is pretty much what you or anyone else would have 
to do for a Gambas control, whether you wrote it in Gambas or 
C++.

3. As you've heard, a report writer is being written, but I think 
a lot of us have ideas for how it ought to work and are eager to 
get code out there.  I may just try to write something 
generalized the next time I have to write a report, and release 
it if there's no "official" report writer.  But this part I'm 
absolutely sure can be done entirely in Gambas, because I 
already wrote it years ago in Java and I suck at Java.

Rob