FF IDE search oddities

[John Montenigro]

Sorry to report this, but I've been noticing very strange things with FF IDE's Find and Replace commands.

I've been doing a LOT of copying, pasting, and editing... I have 4 products, each with its own UDT, but the functions are structurally almost identical, so I've been creating a function for product 1, and copying it, then editing the specific names. Lots of cursor highlighting and deleting, or typeovers.

In a number of editing situations, I've been copying the opening line
     FUNCTION RunMe_AAA (u as AAA_TYPE) as long
then editing the AAA to BBB, etc. In doing this, I might have an "open" function for a few minutes, where it's missing an END FUNCTION statement. (I'm not compiling during this time.) So I wonder if this might be running afoul of the editor's "collapsing code" features (which I don't understand and never use).

I haven't been keeping a record, so these points are from memory as I've been coding.

1. Find and F3 (Find Next) have been "losing their place" a lot. I'll do a search and stop to edit, then click where I want the search to resume, but when I press F3, the search begins not at the cursor click, but somewhere further back, or worse, further forward. It has actually missed obvious matches. My sense is that it's trying to continue from where it left off the last search, rather than the new spot I clicked.

2. Find seems to put the match on around the 4th line of the window, so everything scrolls till the match is there. In a situation where I have 5 lines on the screen that will be matched, and the first one is below the 4th line, there's a different scrolling behavior than when the first one is above the 4th line. I can't recall which behavior happens in each case, but I really prefer neither -- if there are 5 matches on the screen, I'd rather there be NO scrolling until the last one has been handled, and THEN scroll so that the next match, no matter how far down the file it is, is brought up to the 4th line (or so).

There were one or two other things like these, but I think an examination of the F3 behavior will show some odd boundary conditions...

I wish I could be much more precise, but I've got SO much code to edit, I've just been saving constantly, and sometimes exiting FF and restarting. Sometimes that helps, but not usually. (Is there a limit on how long a Module can be?)

Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions once I have this project done and delivered.

Thanks,
-John

[John Montenigro]

Just had another hiccup -- I have a function in which I move data from the members of a UDT into their corresponding controls (mostly textboxes) on the form. In order to make another function that concatenates all those UDT member names into a CSV string, I copied the function, changed its name, and started editing the lines.

Thus:
   FF_Control_SetText(HWND_FRMMAIN_txtUserID, u.h.UserID)
would become
   hdr & = "UserID" & ","

I set the Find value to be the end paren:   )
I set the Replace value to be the double quote, ampersand, DQ, comma, DQ

I was working near the end of a long file. After successfully finding and replacing about 15 instances, FF skipped over 4 of them! It wasn't till after I scrolled upwards that I noticed the skipped lines: they were about 5 lines from the top of the window.

I dismissed the F&R panel, scrolled up, and clicked ahead of the lines needing to be changed, then repeated the F&R. No problems. (So it's NOT that there were differences finding a match to the single-character...)

OK, so then I hit another odd thing:
While I was editing the last function in the file, Find did not find another match at the bottom so it wrapped, and took the position of the first match near the top of the file. I scrolled down to the bottom where I was still working, positioned the pointer ahead of some other matches needing to be changed the same way, CLICKED THE MOUSE, and tried to repeat the last Replace.

But FF conducted the search from that first hit near the top of the file!

To break out of this, I first had to close the Replace dialog, then click the mouse where I wanted to start, open the Replace dialog afresh, and then it worked as it should.

These files are probably the biggest I've ever edited in FF, a little over 700 lines...

So I don't know if this is new behavior, or that I just never saw it before in shorter files...



I'll continue to provide more data as I find it...

-John

[Paul Squires]

Hi John - thanks for the info. I will have to do more work in this area.