Development environment

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

Hi, 
this is an interesting thread, and I'll share some of my own experiences. I've been using the component creator for a couple of years now, together with git, and even using git I think it's a hassle to identify my own changes from additions from the new install from component creator. 

I found the best thing for me is to simply not touch the installed files. In joomla it is possible to get a really long way by doing this smart.  I always override the view files in my templates leaving these view-files in the component untouched. If I need to modify the xml-forms for the model data, I load this in with a onPrepareForm - function in a plugin (it's just a couple of lines of code). I even load extra data in the views with sql, or by loading ekstra model-classes directly (I know this is not good MVC - style).  If I really need to edit the component-code I try to mark it so it's easy to detect what I changed. 

It is also possible to override controller-classes and model - classes in joomla, but I have not tried this yet ( docs.joomla.org/How_to_override_the_comp...rom_the_Joomla!_core )

The thing is when updating with a new build from the component-creator, there are usually many improvements to the code, not only the changed fields, added tables or whatever I did myself, so I see it as benificial to be able to easily load a new version from the component-creator. 

If anyone has other good tactics here, I'd love to hear about it, 

regards Jonas.