Tables are an important part of the Goldenseal interface. They are spreadsheet-like rectangles with a list of details, arranged into rows and columns. Many accounting transactions include breakdown tables. There are similar tables in some types of accounts, and many of the setup lists. Almost all reports use a table. So do the action commands like Pay Bills and Write Payroll.
When we started on Goldenseal back in the mid-90s, computers only had 1 to 4 megabytes of RAM. A construction estimate might have many hundreds of rows in its breakdown table. Multiply that by 18 columns, and a table could take up a significant chunk of available memory.
We built Goldenseal using the CodeWarrior compiler. It included an LTable class in its framework, to manage the rows and columns in a table. LTable was designed to be very frugal with RAM. It did not include much code to manage table appearance or behavior. As a result, Goldenseal has thousands of code lines to handle all the nitty-gritties of tables.
This week, we got far enough along on breakdown tables in the Mac update, to realize that the raw table code is due for a major overhaul.
For one thing, we now have plenty of RAM available. No need to be frugal, so we can redesign table data storage so it’s easier to understand and maintain. On the Mac, we also need to do less. NSTableView (the Cocoa table class for Mac) is already a full-fledged table maker. It handles most of the interface, so our code only needs to store data, and handle the business-specific details. More than half our existing code is unnecessary on the Mac.
We started to delete stuff, but then reverted. It seemed wise to double-check the Windows version, first. Since February our staff has only worked on the Mac version, so there were many changes to sync before we could run the Windows version again.
It turns out that Windows does not have a table class in their MFC framework. That was surprising, since Excel was the main reason that Windows succeeded, and it is just one big table. There are some open-source table libraries out there, but when we checked them, none seemed worth adopting.
Fortunately, we already have code to draw and manage tables. For the Mac, we will bypass it, but for Windows we’ll still use it. What we can still do for both platforms is improve the basic code that manages tables.
Goldenseal uses object-oriented programming, but for some reasons our tables did not use objects for rows, columns and cells. NSTableView has them, and it makes everything much easier to understand. Our staff is about half-way done with rehab work, to add them.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
