Is there a way to maintain a separate and additional library of icons? My problem is every time I update EWB it blatts over my changes to the icon library and they all vanish.

I'd like to keep the defaults as well if possible, but just get the IDE to look somewhere else as well.

> I'd like to keep the defaults as well if possible, but just get the IDE to look somewhere else as well.

You can use only one interface. To juse an altered version just copy the
icon library, alter and save it in a folder that contains your
customized interfaces e.g..

In the IDE go to Environment | Options | Component Library | Search
Paths and add the new folder's path to the search paths. Now move the
new path with the arrow buttons above the default interfaces folder.

I attached a screenshot to make that clear.

Uli

Hi Uli,
sorry I don't quite understand. If I add a new library location in, does it look only in the first one it comes to? I say that because you said it can only use one. In your example there would be two. Unless I have misunderstood?

Sorry, ignore me.
Your example doesn't do that at all. I wasn't reading it properly.

Understood now.
Thanks.

So just to be clear ...

The steps I would need to take are :
1. copy the icons library to a new directory & modify it.
2. delete the icons library from the default  EWB directory.
3. add my directory to the IDE
4. when I update EWB, remember to do steps 2 & 3 each time.

I see that potentially as a problem in that if Tim updates the icons libraries I will not benefit from them.

Has anyone successfully merged custom libraries with the supplied ones?

Ahah - just found this :

http://www.elevatesoft.com/forums?action=view&category=ewb&id=ewb_general&msg=6947

I'll look into that (but if anyone has a good script for doing this and wouldn't mind sharing

On 10/27/2015 11:11 AM, squiffy wrote:

> 2. delete the icons library from the default  EWB directory.

AFAIK - as long as your directory is found first it would use interfaces
from there (and for any interfaces not in your library it would fall
back to default ones so you could just customize some controls).

> 3. add my directory to the IDE

yes - and move it before default one.

I believe new EWB already does this - i have a
"C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Elevate Web Builder 2\Components" library
that i don't i created myself.

> 4. when I update EWB, remember to do steps 2 & 3 each time.

#3 you should not need to do again (it's saved in INI).

However you might need #5 which is to possibly merge the EWB default
interface with yours since Tim might be adding stuff also so your custom
interfaces might not get some few properties if you don't do this.

Raul

squiffy wrote:

> I'll look into that (but if anyone has a good script for doing this
> and wouldn't mind sharing

I've been looking into this elsewhere, and one option that has been
suggested is http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net

Apparently, it should also be possible with a branch merge in
subversion, but that may be getting too fancy. I've been looking at the
files for a short while today, and pondering what the best way forward
is. The JSON has the colour integers, which is a bit of a pity, as that
makes it harder to change all "elevate gray" to a custom colour.

A lot of it also comes down to how much one wants to customise things.
A complete overhaul is a different scale to a small tweak here and
there. Random thought - the IDE could do an update by loading the
master JSON, then reading the customised JSON, and saving it. Indeed,
anything could do that couldn't it. Would that do what we want? It
would pick up all new fields and changes, and then overwrite
customisations. A field that had been removed would persist - I wonder
if that matters. But it would be better to handle it at the JSON level
rather than file level so that merges don't break the text. So the
process would be to run this tool any time there is an IDE update - it
would do a one-off pass. It could also perhaps have an ignore list, so
that it can revert to master for particular properties, but not sure
why that would be needed.

Also, while rambling, an important thing to know that I learned from
the members here - you have to click on the component and then on the
"initialize the interfaces" button, at the top of the form editor
window (no menu version) to get the properties as they are in the
interfaces.

--

Matthew Jones

Matthew Jones wrote:

> Random thought - the IDE could do an update by loading the
> master JSON, then reading the customised JSON, and saving it.

More thoughts later, this doesn't work. The key is that you need to
know if the property was customised, and who by. If the color is
changed by me, I want it to change. If it was changed in an update,
then it should update in the output, but of course the original is
needed to tell if that was the case.

I think that a custom tool for this will be needed, and am pondering
it. That it is JSON makes it "easy" I think...

--

Matthew Jones

Matthew,

I'm doing some more "research" into this issue.  The icon library issue is easy to solve vis-à-vis Christian Kaufmann's suggestion: just move to a TImageList-y solution for icons.  That's solved.

The bigger issue of how to deal with "theming" and mass updating of control interfaces is much harder to solve, but as you say, I think that a larger description of how the over-arching UI elements are styled is how to handle things.  For example, with the default control interfaces the corners are always square.  Of course, the problem is that things get a lot more complicated when trying to handle things like color schemes, etc., so I'm thinking that an intelligent (coded) theme batch processor will be needed, and I'm not sure if a "description file" is possible.  IOW, the batch processor will need to make some assumptions about how things are applied, depending upon the target control.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com