Scrolling, Paging and Resizing - Tue, 4 Aug 2009

That’s better. Now making better progress. It took only a week to implement the scrolling, paging and resizing of the new virtual view into the Everything Report. What this means is that even for extremely large files, the you will be able to resize the report very quickly, without the delay that happened in prior versions due to the required reformatting of the entire report.

So I’m really relieved that I’ve got through this. Looking back in my blog, I see I started this back in mid January, so it’s taken over six months to get it working right. As always I never expected it to take this long, but I was advancing into unmarked territory. Several times along the way I wondered if I should continue, but the speed improvement in loading time that was even apparent in small test files implored me of the necessity to go on and complete this.

Next step is to reimplement the level 0 structure based GEDCOM and optimize the lookups with hash functions that I did late last year. But on January 12th, I had to step back because Behold itself had stopped working due to the changes.

This won’t be a problem. I have saved snapshots of all my major changes. So I’ll be able to add this easily again, while making sure that Behold continues working all along. I’ve found that when I’ve had to program something a 2nd time, I always end up with better code (because of the 2nd look) in half the time it originally took. Noone wants to program something a second time, but it’s never that bad when you have to.

Hmm. If I could program something the 2nd time all the time, then I should be able to get everything done in half the time, shouldn’t I?