Continuing from previous notes on efficient GUI management.
Solution
It can be quite a task initially perfoming the optimisation manually, but there are a few benefits associated with doing this:
- Clarity and readability of scripts.
- Acts as a secondary error checking method. If you are recording something on a screen with a learned and optimised GUI, and an object reference appears in normal (non-optimised) format, this can be an indication of application changes or inconsistency, or a lack of robustness/versatility of the current GUI map structure (or both).
- When you are searching the GUI map it is easier to find objects as they are now grouped together within each parent window, ie., all edits are together etc.
- Helps to identify duplicity of objects.
- Helps to identify new objects that have appeared in the GUI map.
If you were doing this frequently or wanted to a little resouceful, a quick program to perform some level of the optimisation (like the renaming) on the saved ?gui?file would not be difficult to write.
Another note:
The Temporary GUI buffer dynamically stores any new object or windows that you come across in the course of scripting. The temporary buffer appears the same as any other GUI file, but it cannot be closed. It is always there to catch new objects recorded instead of integrating them directly into any project GUI file you may have open (usually).
Items appearing in the temporary buffer should be integrated and optimised (where appropriate) or deleted as quickly as possible, to remove script dependence on temporary objects and GUI files. It should be noted that any lines of code generated using these items would fail once the descriptions are altered. Once GUI modifications are done, it is recommended that you re-record statements that used those objects or update script object references to ensure script integrity.
Before running any scripts for testing purposes, ensure that the Temporary GUI is empty, and the Project GUI is a saved version.