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Day 6: Finished Product
Issue: 1.6 (June/July 2003)
Author: William Leshner
Author Bio: William Leshner has been programming for twenty years and programming Macs for ten. He has spent a good deal of the last several years building REALbasic applications, including the now famous ResPloder.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,888
Starting Page Number: 40
Article Number: 1621
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1621.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:57
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Excerpt of article text...
We have been holding a series of staff meetings to design and build an application called ShipIt! from scratch in REALbasic. ShipIt! creates release documents, such as the "Read Me" file and user guide, for a software release. In this, our final meeting, we will finish ShipIt!. We still must add code to open ShipIt! files, and we also need to add an About window and an icon. Once those three tasks have been accomplished ShipIt! will be a finished application, ready to ship to our customers.
Opening ShipIt! Files
In our last meeting we wrote a simple XML parser to parse ShipIt! document files. However, we didn't have time to write the code that recreates a ShipIt! document window from a ShipIt! file. We will take care of that now. You may want to refer back to our last meeting in which we designed and built our XML parser.
All of ShipIt!'s XML action happens in DocWindow's RestoreFrom method. RestoreFrom takes a BinaryStream of XML, parses the XML with SimpleXmlParser, and then uses the resulting tree of SimpleXmlNodes to extract the information necessary to rebuild the DocWindow. Recall from our previous meetings that a ShipIt! DocWindow consists of a tab panel with a Templates tab and a Variables tab. Templates and variables are lists of name/value pairs. The XML format we devised to encode that information looks like this:
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