It seems that I cannot bind to the “Name” property of an object (e.g. a container). Is this true? If so, I would like to see this capability, to save some repetitive typing.
This is true. While this is a feature we could add, the way you’d do this is to add a dynamic property, maybe called “_name”. You could then bind the name of the component to that property, and bind other things to that too.
Hope this helps,
Yes, that’s what I am doing. Just trying to save myself some typing, and therefore some time (and therefore some money).
In general, I think that there are a lot of places where FPMI could be friendlier, in the sense of saving the developer time in typing and mouse clicks. This post is about one of them. Another, for instance, is this - FPMI should remember the last place I exported a file to, so I don’t have to click through my folder tree each time.
Just in general, if I can create an application faster using your tools, then your tools are cheaper for me to use and it is easier to sell projects using them. My ease of use translates to your bottom line.
I completely agree. FactoryPMI could and should be more friendly and easy to use. We are working on this daily here at IA. My post wasn’t meant to say “look, you can do it like this so we won’t implement your feature request”. Quite the contrary. We value these feature requests, and many customer feature requests have already made it into the software. I was just suggesting a workaround, as it is infeasable for us to implement every feature request right away.
Of course, we’re focusing primarily on the major ease-of-use offenders around here. Our upcoming SQLTags feature is all about ease of use and decreasing FactoryPMI’s learning curve. We’ll do what we can to sneak these minor requests into a point release.
I do want to make sure that you’ve discovered the custom palettes feature. Using this feature, you could customize a component (like putting putting the name binding on it like suggested above), and then save that component to your own palette, and then simply use that customized component everywhere. This should reduce your clicks dramatically in this situation (and many others)
And lastly, to be fair, I suspect that with our licensing model and the immense amount of time saved on client deployment using our web-deployed architecture, your bottom line using our products should already be pretty favorable…
In any case, keep those feature requests coming! We do value them and we do understand that ease of use is very important.
Cheers,