Development environment

Hi Andres,

I think I'm not communication my question/desire well or maybe you're answering it and it's just not what I want to hear.

Let me cite a simple example to try to illustrate my question.  Let's say I have a component with 1 table.  So I go into Component Creator UI and do all the necessary stuff and create my wonderful Admin and UI pages.  In doing so, I manually edit, post-build, several files so that they are now different from the Component Creator gave me.  Now we get to the important part.  Let's say I want to add table #2 to my component.  I go into Component Creator and add the second table and once again create Admin and UI pages.  When I build the component again, should it be my expectation that, if I were to not backup all my files from table #1, that they will all get overwritten?  NOTE:  The same example can be "I have table #1, build, modify files and then add a single column to table #1".

I have to admit that I find that problematic if I have to store my manual changes and merge them into the code each time I rebuild.  I'm not saying that I have any great solution for that, only that's a real pain to do so.

So the bottom line is that, aside from source control, it would be nice to know what the expectation is for a Component Creator user doing incremental changes.  Actually I do see how source control code, in theory, help by being able to refresh from source control into the build directory and copy over the manually changed files that I made post-build, so maybe that's the answer.

Regards,
Rob

Hi Søren,

Thanks for the clarification.  I understand that no software can be absolutely perfect especially after the user customizes parts of it.  As a professional software developer of 25 years I can tell you that despite one's best efforts to design something perfectly up front that things change, all the time, even the slightest of things.  I truly enjoy using Component Creator so much that I would like it to have no flaws, at least for me

So my final suggestion to you guys is to at least consider the possibility of adding a feature that will (and let me be clear that I don't even know if this is possible) to only install the files that the user denotes as changed when installing the newly built component.  Let me explain, since that barely even made sense to me.  Let's take my example from before where I have Table #1 and I build and customize files and then I add Table #2 and re-build.  If there was some way I could tell the component's installation files to only install the files from Table #2 so as not to disturb Table #1, that would be great.  I'm not at all versed in Joomla installation files so I don't even know if that's possible.

Anyway, keep up the good work and I will continue to research GIT.

Regards,
Rob

Hi,

OK, thanks for the explanation and workaround.  I'm glad I'm not crazy and that my idea was good, though not practical.

Speaking of source control, is there one in particular you recommend?

Regards,
Rob