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Making Code Pretty
Using IDE Scripting for Custom Code Formatting
Issue: 15.5 (September/October 2017)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 15,290
Starting Page Number: 66
Article Number: 15507
Resource File(s):
project15507.zip Updated: 2017-09-05 00:14:46
Related Web Link(s):
http://developer.xojo.com/custom-code-reformatting
Excerpt of article text...
We all have coding standards and try to be consistent in the way we write our programs, but it can be hard. I've long considered writing a program to change code to match my style, but have never gotten around to doing it. Now with Xojo 2017r2, Xojo has inspired me with a new feature: custom code reformatting.
As you may know, Xojo has long had a preference setting for automatically reformatting your code to match a certain style. The problem was, if you didn't like that style, there was nothing you could do about it. Now you can write a script that runs to style your code just the way you want it!
Well, that's the theory, anyway. In practice, I've found this new feature to be painful to implement.
Creating ReformatCode.xojo_script
In principle, using this new feature is easy. Just create a new XojoScript called "ReformatCode.xojo_script" and stick it in the
Scriptsfolder inside Xojo's folder. Then when you select some code in Xojo and bring up the contextual menu (see Figure 1), you can choose the "Standardize Format" to run the script.(A XojoScript is a plain text file, so you can create this with any text editor. You can also create it with Xojo's "New IDE Script" menu command which you'll find on the File menu under "IDE Scripting." This will provide you with an editor that will apply color syntaxing and other features to make scripting easier.)
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