[KevinH]

All Good Points.

Perhaps, as you suggest instead of relying only on ShowMessageOnStatus bar to report things back, we do the following:

- when automate is first called we open a non-modal dialog with a log window
and a cancel button

- show the progress and results of the automate list step by step.
Sort of like the log window we generate for plugins.

But that will really clutter up the screen with more windows such as a non-modal dialog window plus lots of plugin related dialogs and output.

A better and simpler approach might be to modify the ShowMessageOnStatusBar routine to to append things to an automate log file as long as m_UsingAutomate is true.

Then once the automate list stops, a read only dialog of all the ShowStatusBarMessages is displayed with a OK button to continue. Sort of like the RepoManager logs.

This will all take some thinking and depends on developing a way to know if any non-modal dialog is closed or hidden so that automate operations can effectively block until those dialogs are complete.


Thanks!

KevinH

Originally Posted by BeckyEbook

Ad 1. English names will be the best. translations sometimes change, not complete, etc., so it's asking for trouble. The Automate option is intended for advanced users, so creating "automateXX.txt" script with English names should be OK.

Ad 2. If it is well described in the documentation – a good idea.

Ad 3. Of course, we wait until these dialogs are closed.

Ad 4. Hmmm ... A difficult matter, because in Saved Searches we can do various actions: Find, Replace, Replace/Find, Replace All.

Maybe something as:
* "F&R-Find:GroupNameFromSavedSearches" (calling a search in the whole group, probably quote marks will be necessary)

* "F&R-ReplaceAll:GroupNameFromSavedSearches/Single Sample Replace" (Replace All In Single Search In Saved Searches)

-----

I would add an optional AutomateXX operation report (message box? logfile?):

Function Name or Plugin Name 1: passed
Function Name or Plugin Name 2: passed
Function Name or Plugin Name 3: passed with errors
Aborted by user

Personally, I built a new version and played around with this option (only plugins so far).
Despite my earlier doubts, it might come in handy for some repetitive operations on each file.

That's why I noticed that I missed a summary/report in which I could see that all the plugins "did their job" without errors. Now I have to look at the statusbar, because it is probably only there that we can see what is going on.