Sometimes your own dogfood tastes good

Wed 13 Jul 2005, 02:36 PM

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by Ben Langhinrichs
While I don't much like the phrase "eating your own dogfood", the concept is good.  Any software developer should use his or her own software on a regular basis.  Sometimes that is a nuisance, but sometimes, like today, it is a pleasure.  I realized that our Web Editors page had lots, as in 285, URL links, and that many of them had a target of "_top" to replace the current page, when I wanted them to have a target of "_blank" to create a new page.  I changed about ten by hand, got bored, and wrote a quick Midas script which took care of them all in about 5 seconds (plus the five minutes it took to write).  Here is the code:

Call rtitem.ConnectFormBody("", "showcase.nsf", "WebEditors")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("URLLink 1")
While rtchunk.Exists
   target = rtchunk.GetTargetProperties("URLLink", "Target")
   If target <> "_blank" Then Call rtchunk.SetTargetProperties("URLLink", "Target='_blank'")
   rtchunk.GetNextTarget
Wend
rtitem.Save
Messagebox("Fixed up all " & rtitem.Everything.GetCount("URLLink") & " URL hotspots")

See, your own dogfood can taste good, once in a while.  Of course, I could have written it more simply and efficiently, I now see, with:

Call rtitem.ConnectFormBody("", "showcase.nsf", "WebEditors")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("URLLink *")
Call rtchunk.SetTargetProperties("URLLink", "Target='_blank'")
rtitem.Save
Messagebox("Fixed up all " & rtitem.Everything.GetCount("URLLink") & " URL hotspots")

which runs in about a second and a half, but in either case, it sure beats going to each hotspot manually.

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