by kazar » Mon Dec 11, 2006 6:54 am
Hi Antonio -- I've also found myself wishing this, but then have ended up finding better ways to approach the UI in terms of using tab panels for "reusable" elements and making use of dynamic runtime properties to make changes to the same form rather than duplicating a form.
Nevertheless I still do contemplate whether form elements and the properties associated with them should have a "separate life", in the Servoy Object Model, from the forms they are placed on, and have not yet arrived at a conclusive opinion on this topic. So I'm posting back to ask "why in Servoy would you need to duplicate a form?" (i.e., why would you need two separate forms that are so similar?) And to ask "why not use tabpanels to contain all reusable form objects?"
Meanwhile, whether this feature request (which I believe I've seen from other folks, too) is ever fulfilled or not ... have you considered creating a tiny mini-form for a field that has the event property, and just pulling that one-field miniform into a hidden tabpanel? You could then duplicate the form that has this tabpanel on it.
Still, to me there is this larger issue of having two forms that are so similar you would want to duplicate Form A to create Form B. Seems you are letting yourself in for extra maintenance if you decide to rearrange things on one form, and then have to do the same on the other form to keep them consistent with each other. Hence my curiosity for the business case or other reason for needing two similar forms in Servoy. (I know many tool-related reasons why I created duplicate forms when I used FMP, but thus far have found no reason for the same kind of device in Servoy.)
TIA for helping me continue my thought process on this topic ...
kazar