[AccessD] To a man with a hammer

[Charlotte Foust]

John,
I understand what you are saying and took much the same approach when I was
still building Access apps, it feels unkind to put down developers who are
still learning or who are working under constraints that don't allow them
to use our approach.

Charlotte Foust
(916) 206-4336


On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 5:22 AM John Colby <jwcolby at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my opinion, the user interface is an absolutely critical part of any
> app.  Too often the programmer treats the UI as an afterthought, which ends
> up causing the entire application to be a disjointed mess.  I have designed
> dozens of applications for dozens of companies over the 25 years I have
> worked in Access and over that time I figured out UI things which should
> just always be the same, everywhere, in every form.
>
> Notice that in Windows, every single application has a set of three
> controls in the upper right corner, a 'close', 'restore down', and a
> 'minimize' button.  Always there.  Not sometimes there and sometimes
> somewhere else, and sometimes not present.  In fact if we as developers
> want that to not appear in our forms we have to jump through hoops to make
> it not appear.
>
> So whenever I see a developer describing shoving UI kinds of things into a
> form class, my mind cringes.  As soon as I place anything into a form class
> that has any chance of being used twice I have started a UI disjointed
> mess.  I have taken over other developer's projects, and understanding all
> the crap in the typical form class is one of the major undertakings.
>
> As for a class being a hammer... in my view even saying such a thing speaks
> volumes about the person saying it.  They either don't understand classes
> or they have no imagination.  And yes, I get tired of being told I have no
> imagination when in fact it is the person saying such things which has no
> imagination.
>
> I have a class which wraps every single data aware UI object in Access,
> think textbox, combo, radio button etc.  I have a pair of classes which
> collect errors as they occur.  I have a class which logs anything.  The
> error handler class uses the log class to log errors collected.  I have an
> FTP class, not as useful as it once was.  A class to do MD5 hashes.  A pair
> of classes to parse and deal with OpenArgs for when a form opens.  A pair
> of classes which read Sysvars out of my SysVar table and caches them into
> memory so the app doesn't have to hit a table every time.  A timer class of
> course.  A zip class, with a matching unzip class.  And many more classes
> as well.  All, BTW, placed out in a framework library which can be
> referenced from any app I desire.
>
> What about those many varied purposes describes using a hammer to you?
> Well maybe, if you have no imagination I suppose.
> --
> John W. Colby
> Colby Consulting
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