Building Developer Friendly Custom Apps – YouTube

Developer Friendly Custom Apps

Makah Encarnanao of Soliant Consulting on building developer friendly custom apps. Here are some things you will learn:

• How to make your comments effective, and discover non-obvious ways to make comments
• How to organize your custom app so things are easy to find
• How to label your fields, layouts, tables, scripts, and custom functions effectively for development
• How to handle custom app modifications so that they are well-tracked and well-documented

One convention I prefer is to number scripts using 4 digit numbers (1000, 1001, etc.) and to use letters to nest them, such as 1001a, 1001b, and so on.  Mostly because I can remember  4 digit number much easier and longer than something like ” [Print] Contacts from list on pdf layout” or something similar.

I particularly like these tips from the video:

• Put developer tips on the layout that are visible only in layout mode
• Commenting scripts heavily
• The goal of making an app easy for another developer to take over
• Using “ID” for primary key and “id_tablename” for a foreign key (that last one is a variation on her tip)

Makah’s video is full of helpful techniques and well worth the watch.