Sequence Editor (R7460)

Sequence Editor

The Sequence Editor is an all new implementation of the Classic sequence editor. Features include:

• Close visual and functional consistency with the macOS index editor.
• The new editor window can be resized to any reasonable size.
• The editor window shows only the steps in the sequence; other options are controlled in the Inspector panel.
• When a sequence editor window is active, the Element Panel displays four tabs, one each for views, users, commands and sequences that can be added to the active sequence.
• As with all of the new icon editors, changes made to a sequence are not final until the the sequence is ‘committed.’ If a mistake is made (or you change your mind) the changes can be ‘reverted’ and the sequence is restored to its former state.

General Editor Enhancements

Icon Well (R7857)

The Icon Well feature from Classic RADE has been restored.

• The icon well is as an extension of the Element Panel, which was introduced last month.
• When the collection window is active, the Element Panel shows the collection-level icons, as shown on the right.
• When a relation window is active, the Element Panel shows the relation-level icons. (Click for image)
• Dragging an icon from the icon well works just as it did in Classic Helix: drag an icon to the collection or relation window and a new icon of that type is created.
• The icon well is another step in the restoration of View by Icon.

Graphic User Interface Enhancements

• 7835: Helix now sorts icons in a consistent manner.

  The following items are now sorted using Apple’s Core Foundation (CF) sorting instead of wxString:

  1. Collection, relation, and where used windows
  2. Inspector popups
  3. Inspector dialogs
  4. Element Panel lists

  Icons are now sorted in this order:

  1. Punctuation characters — such as space, comma, dash, en dash, bullet, pilcrow, etc. in Unicode order
  2. Numbers — in true numeric order
  3. Alpha characters — case insensitive, including characters with diacriticals such as e, é, è, ë, ê, ƒ, ø, Å…
  4. Non-Roman alpha characters — such as Greek µ, π, Ω… in alpha order.

  For the technically inclined: we are using these CF options: kCFCompareCaseInsensitive, kCFCompareLocalized, kCFCompareNumerically.

• A specification in Classic Helix that suppresses an icons whose name is blank from selection dialogs has been removed. Icons that do not appear at all in Classic RADE selection lists appear in macOS RADE as an icon with no name (except in the Element Panel, in which only a blank line appears).
• 7544: Dragging a document (from a Helix document field) to the desktop now performs a Copy to Volume operation.
• 7804: An entry view’s full query expression can now be seen (as a read only value) in the Inspector.

  This query expression — which uses the Abacus Expression Language — is the combination of the current Quick Query and any underlying abacus/form/power query, taking the also use option into consideration as well. A couple of minor display bugs remain certain cases; these are being tracked in R7887.

• 7872: The Inspector now contains a line to identify the parent of the selected icon(s).
• A field’s validation abacus popup now displays icons, just like all the other popups in the Inspector.
• Creating a new Form Query or Power Query now creates an icon with the full icon name, instead of ‘FQuery’ and ‘PQuery’ as it did before.

AppleScript Enhancements

• 7804: You can now get the full query expression of an entry view.

  This query expression — which uses the Abacus Expression Language — is the combination of the current Quick Query and any underlying abacus/form/power query, taking the also use option into consideration as well.

• 7805: You can now get the ‘parent’ of a tile via AppleScript to discover which abacus it is part of.

Abacus Optimization

• 7832: Last month’s release fixed all but one instance of a bug that had existed since Helix RADE 6.2b8 (5767) — that remaining case has now been fixed, but abaci that were modified via any method using macOS RADE may still be affected. This applies to visible abaci (the icons) as well as ‘invisible’ ones that are used for queries (quick, form, power), post target and subform linkages.

  The problem is that some of the optimization flags for certain abaci were not being set appropriately. These flags can be seen in the Inspector as a series of grayed out (read only) checkboxes in the Abacus Properties section. They all start with the word “Includes … ” plus the “Is a summary calculation” flag. These flags are used to allow Helix to quickly determine whether a specific abacus can be used in certain places.

  As a result of this bug, some abaci may appear to be allowed in places where they should not be (e.g. a ‘today’ abacus in an index) or they may not appear in places where they should be allowed (e.g. as a valid icon for a lookup tile).

  Although the Inspector now correctly sets the optimization flags, it has been discovered that modifying an abacus via AppleScript causes the “Is a summary calculation” flag to be set incorrectly. This has been fixed in Preliminary Release 17. (See R7901)

  A script that corrects every abacus in a collection and reports on optimization discrepancies is available on our free scripts page.

General Fixes

• 7754: An icon’s Where Used windows now stays in sync when references are added or removed.
• 7750: A Post All no longer gets hung if an Autosave is required.

  The bug (R7569) that a Post All operation does not show a progress dialog is still open. During a Post All, the cursor changes to a spinning beach ball. Be patient; Helix has not crashed.

• 7838: Opening multiple views no longer sometimes leaves RADE confused about which window is active.

  When a second view was opened before the first one was constructed, RADE would fail to enable the proper commands for the frontmost view.

• 7849: A rare case that caused views with multiple dynamic popups to open with its menu commands disabled is fixed.
• 7878: Creating a new abacus with an expression that references icons in other relations no longer triggers a 7602 error.

Inspector Fixes

• 7530: The Inspector now stays in much better sync with changes made in the active window, and vice versa.
• 7796: A bug that caused checkboxes in an Inspector dialog to draw incorrectly when clicked in a specific order has been fixed.
• 7828: Opening a Post Configuration dialog, but not making any changes, no longer triggers a crash.
• 7828: The Post’s Auto open view property now retains the selected view.
• 7880: Changing the properties of an open view once again updates the view (if it is open) to show a preview of the change.
• The Inspector window no longer briefly draws the buttons in the upper left corner the first time it is shown.