Sorry guys, for not posting for quite some time. Was busy travelling…
I am now back with another interesting article, which would be very useful, especially for developers in Dexterity.
Many of us would have noticed this icon shown below on every object in Dexterity.
Clicking on this button gives the menu as shown below:
Generally, we are used to seeing a blank window as shown below:
This option has been provided in Dexterity, so that users can verify any references made for the specific object in any other objects like forms, procedures and functions. It will also show the references to other objects made by the specific object as well.
The Refers To menu actually opens up the references made to other objects on this object. For example, I have displayed a sample where I have seen all the references made on the Startup Script using the Refers To command. The window opens up like this:
The pane on the left displays all the references to various procedures, functions and forms made on the Startup Procedure. When selecting a particular reference, the window displays the other references made to the selected object. We can double click on the selected procedure to open the script editor to view the code of that object.
But how to we enable this option to see these references? For the purpose of that, we need to go to Dexterity Options >> Reference Tab. You will notice a checkbox labeled “Update Reference Information on Compile”. Check this option. Once this option is checked, every time the dictionary is compiled, the references are updated and the above window gets updated with information.
The reference information is stored in the file names {Dictionary Name}_ref.dat and {Dictionary Name}_ref.idx.