One Project Completed - PrepHelp

Hello everyone!

I should have posted this a little earlier, but time got away from me. I finished up the code stuff for PrepHelp. It now is a fully functional little program. Yippie! You can download it from here, but be warned: I have not improved the visuals past the mock ups I made for testing. I was planning on it but another idea came up that I will explain a little later. I did, however, provide a little instruction image pointing out what some of the more obscure, unlabeled buttons do.

I believe on my last post all I had left to do was set up the search feature, as well as implement the medical item category as well. The latter was very simple, just copy, paste, change a few names, and done. The search function...at first I thought it'd be easy, just do a check against the types and it will find them and sort them. Well, I was partially right. Actually finding the elements was the easy part, the hard part was figuring out how to display just the search results without overwriting my existing inventory.

Since I wanted to find all of the elements in the array that matched the given item type I found that the Array.Find() function wouldn't suit my purposes without a bunch of work. Instead I created a for loop, where on each element it would check if the item type matched the searched type. Here is an example below.

function SubmitSearch(string TempType)
{
    local GFxObject DataProvider;
    local GFxObject TempObj;
    local int j;

    //Clearing the temp array
    PP.TempFoodInv.length = 0;

    for(i = 0; i < PP.FInv.length; i++)
    {
        if(PP.FInv[i].T == TempType)
        {
            j = PP.TempFoodInv.length;
            PP.TempFoodInv.length = PP.TempFoodInv.Length + 1;

            PP.TempFoodInv[j].N = PP.FInv[i].N;
            PP.TempFoodInv[j].T = PP.FInv[i].T;
            PP.TempFoodInv[j].Q = PP.FInv[i].Q;
            PP.TempFoodInv[j].E = i; //Setting the temp element number to i so it will show where it is in the food inventory

            PP.TempFoodInv[j].D.Y = PP.FInv[i].D.Y;
            PP.TempFoodInv[j].D.D = PP.FInv[i].D.D;
            PP.TempFoodInv[j].D.M = PP.FInv[i].D.M;
        }
    }
    
    //If any matches were found, draw the new inventory
    if(PP.TempFoodInv.length > 0)
    {
        bFood = true;

        DataProvider = CreateArray();
    
        for(i = 0; i < PP.TempFoodInv.length; i++)
        {
            TempObj = CreateObject("Object");
    
            TempObj.SetString("FoodItem", PP.TempFoodInv[i].N);
            TempObj.SetString("Type", PP.TempFoodInv[i].T);
            TempObj.SetInt("Quantity", PP.TempFoodInv[i].Q);
            TempObj.SetInt("Element", PP.TempFoodInv[i].E);

            TempObj.SetInt("ExpY", PP.TempFoodInv[i].D.Y);
            TempObj.SetInt("ExpD", PP.TempFoodInv[i].D.D);
            TempObj.SetInt("ExpM", PP.TempFoodInv[i].D.M);
    
            DataProvider.SetElementObject(i, TempObj);
        }

        RootMC.SetObject("foodInvo", DataProvider);
    
        ActionScriptVoid("_root.clearInvo");
        ActionScriptVoid("_root.drawFoodInvo");
    }
    
    //If no matches were found, show an error
    else
    {
        ActionScriptVoid("_root.spawnSearchError");
    }
}

If the for loop found an element it would copy it to a new array. After it finished searching the entire array the temp array would be sent over to the SWF to be displayed. This way, my original item array would remain intact and I would only be displaying the contents of the found items.

Now, to talk about the idea that got in the way of redoing the graphics for PrepHelp. I have been calling it AssetManager, but the name will probably change. Basically it is just a remake of PrepHelp, but focused on helping keep track of the different assets needed for the projects I'm working on. I hope this can help me, and possibly others, keep track of how many things they need to work on, when they're due, and at what stage of development they are at. I could just take PrepHelp and rename few things and call it good, but that just isn't good enough.

While I was figuring out how to do the search feature I thought of a better way of doing things to make the whole system more dynamic. I figured if it was going to help you keep track of all the assets for every project you are working on it will have to be more flexible than having only two set categories(like food and medical in PrepHelp). So I am in the process of reworking it to allow user added categories with their own asset lists. This way a person can add as many projects as they would like, and the system would still work perfectly. I do plan on making graphics for AssetManager though, since I will probably be using it more than PrepHelp.

One feature I wanted to add, but couldn't figure out until a couple days ago was having a auto adjusting thumb on a scroll bar. Meaning, if you only had a couple items the thumb on the slider would be really big, while it would be a lot smaller if you had a bunch of items. That way you wouldn't have to drag as far to move a few items up, just like on a webpage. I have a working version, though it could use some tweaking if I can figure out to... Anyway here is the first version of it, using the inventory test I made a couple months ago and put up on my blog.

That's all I have for now. When I get the rest of the code wrapped up for AssetManager I'll fill in more detail on how I went about doing some of that stuff.