Indent not always working

FinalBuilder Discussion
1

Hi,

In my action list, Ctrl+left/right arrow work on some actions and not on others. Why?

Thanks.

2

Actually, I cannot indent the actions immediately following a comment. I wanted to outline action groups headed by a comment. But I can only indent the second action in the group and the following actions, but not the one following the comment. This is obviously intentional but I don’t see the rationale behind this decision.

3

Also, it would be nice if we could insert blank lines in the action list. This would make the list more readable.
Or did I miss it?

Thanks.

4

More details about this issue…

Ideally, I shoudl be able to organize my action lists as follows (dashes are shown just because leading spaces are removed by the forum text editor):

first level comment

—second level comment
------action 1
------action 2

—second level comment
------action 3
------action 4

first level comment


nicely arranged with blank lines. But I can’t for two reasons:

1. I can’t indent anything following a comment.
2. If I indent a comment, I can’t indent the next item past the indentation level of the preceding comment.

Thanks in advance.

5

I have also tried to insert empty comments to create blank lines but the program automatically inserts the “Comment” string when the comment is empty.

6

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your posts.

Comments are somewhat different from other actions, in that they are never executed and therefore cannot have child actions. If you need this functionality,I suggest you just use Action Groups which are really the same as comments, except they actually get executed and can have children.

As for the empty Comment string, I’ll look into working around this (it’s the default behaviour for all actions that if you erase the description, it resets to the action name, but I guess in the case of a Comment this makes no sense.) In the meantime, you can just use a single space character as the description and you’ll get the behaviour you want.

Hth.

7

Hi Angus,

I don’t really need child actions. This is just a matter of presentation. I want to make my action list readable. I know that the next version will allow to change the color of comments which is already a good thing. But being able to nicely organize the action list (with blank lines and indentation) would be better.

Finally, it is source code :slight_smile: and it must be readable. I’ll see if Action Groups can help.

8

OK. Using Action groups helps a lot. This and being able to colour the comments differently should be enough. Thanks.

By the way, now that I have fully automatized the build of my current project, I see that FB makes me save a lot of time. I will advertise this.

–
Patrick Philippot - Microsoft MVP
MainSoft Consulting Services
www.mainsoft.fr

9

Hi Patrick,

I’m glad this worked out for you, and especially glad your build process is working well. I’m guessing that you see now how indentation in FinalBuilder is caused by parent and child actions.

Think of it like the auto-indent mode in your favourite IDE/Text Editor. :-). Action Groups are like curly braces.

(Unless you’re a Python developer, in which case it probably makes no sense at all. ;-).)

- Angus