Design Studio SDK - BIAL for...next loop (and my first GitHub co-author attempt)

[mike_howles4]

In the continued spirit of collaborating with karol.kalisz, I wanted to see if I could add some additional utility to his new Design Studio SDK: Array Util Component.  This was born out of a need to do things you'd want to do with arrays such as How to get "Top X" our of resultset, for example.

Next up is that I wanted to get back a for loop in BIAL.  We have a forEach loop but for loops are not yet allowed.  Karol also added me as a co-author to his GitHub repository (KarolKalisz/DesignStudioSdkPack · GitHub) so I figured I'd see how easy or hard it is to use GitHub as intended as a code check-in and collaboration tool versus just a sharing code site.

So, I've enhanced DesignStudioSdkPack/contribution.ztl at master · KarolKalisz/DesignStudioSdkPack · GitHub with a new method called 'eaches' -- This also is an example of how you can markup your ZTL code with some JavaDoc information for your BIAL scripters to know what things do.

The code:

/**

  Generates an array of integers for use in BIAL forEach statement in order to emulate a traditional for loop.

  <example>

  Fill a list box with 10 values:

  <code>ARRAY_1.eachesAsString(0, 9, 1).forEach(function(element, index) {<br>

  LISTBOX_1.addItem(element, "Item " + (element + "") );<br>

  });</code>

  This would be equivalent to a loop in JavaScript:

  <code>

  for(var element = 0;element<=9;element++){<br>

  Your code here.<br>

  }

  </code>

  </example>

  */

  Array eaches(/*Starting int*/ int start, /* Ending int */ int finish, /* Interval increment */int interval) {*

  var a = [];

  for(var i=start;i<=finish;i+=interval){

  a.push(i);

  }

  return a;

  *}

That's it!  What's it do?  The code documentation is shown above, but it's a bit easier to read during BIAL scripting time:

As we can see here, a little effort in documenting will help out your BIAL scripters know what the method does, so as we see in this tooltip, it does (or should do) what I mentioned, which is a for loop.  Let's click the Button and see what the results are at runtime:

Looks like it's working!  :smile:

As far as my experience with pulling down Karol's repository, that's easy.  I suggest using 'GitHub for Windows' unless you are a big PowerShell fan, the GUI version is very easy to use.  Here's the main interface, with some of my own repos aas well as Karol's:

I right-clicked his repository, and cloned it to a location on my hard drive.  Next, I switched to my Eclipse SDK and went to File -> Import... and browsed to the location and chose the subfolder containing the project I wanted to import.  In this case, it was 'org.kalisz.karol.scn.pack'.  I unchecked 'Copy projects into workspace' since I wanted it to stick with the Git repo clone location.  Below is an example of what an Eclipse project looks like when it senses there is a Git repo associated with it.

I then made modifications mentioned at the beginning of the blog to the contribution.ztl file.

Once I was done coding and testing on my local repo, I wanted to commit the changes back to Github.  After fumbling around, I found the context menu path to do so:

I was then prompted to describe my change, which I said "Added 'eaches' method to Karol's Array component." and then clicked 'Commit and Push'.

When switching back to my GitHub for windows, I could see the changes in the history, as well on on the web.  Success!

I'm sure for GitHub veterans, this is child's play but for me this was easier than I expected.  There's a bunch of other stuff I'm sure GitHub is good at doing indicated in the context menu screenshot, but this was good for now :smile: