Exporting STV Import and retaining references

[fafurd]

Question 1: I noticed that when I export my import, the references are not maintained and instead it makes a copy. I understand this and it makes sense, but there are some themes that I'm referencing and if those primary themes are changed, I also want my import to reflect the same. Is there an option that will retain those references?

Question 2: I have added some stuff within two different menus. When I export it, how do I do so from two different panels and only export a partial vs. the entire thing? In this case, I have one menu that I will export the entire thing and the other would only be a partial. When I tried to do what seemed obvious, it appeared to do the entire thing.

[GKusnick]

The way STVI authors generally handle references to standard themes and such is to break the references manually before export and put code under the STVImported hook in the STVI to look them up and relink them at import time.

Similarly, if you want your STVI to insert code under an existing menu, you must include the code to be inserted in the STVI and then write some code under STVIImported to look up the insertion point in the existing menu and link it up to the new code.

Flachbar has posted some tools for simplifying the lookup-and-relinking part of this process, but it's still up to you to encode the links manually and write the STVImported code to call into his lookup functions.

As it happens, I'm getting close to releasing my own STVI toolkit that automates both sides of the process, export and import. So if you can wait a few days you might find things a bit easier in the near future.

[GKusnick]

OK, the newest version of my Studio Tools package includes the STVI toolkit I mentioned. Instructions are in the Javadocs included with the package.

[fafurd]

What great timing. I'll take a look at it

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

OK, the newest version of my Studio Tools package includes the STVI toolkit I mentioned. Instructions are in the Javadocs included with the package.

Sweet! I've always found it a PITA to build an STVi, even rudimentary ones. I think I've regained some motivation to work on one of my imports.

Here's a blue-sky feature request:
How about an option to compare two STVs (eg the default, and a modified version) and export the differences as an STVi

[GKusnick]

Well sure, that would be the utlimate. In fact since there's an STV comparison command already, I never quite understood why Studio didn't have a compare-and-export option built in from the getgo.

Doing it as an add-on isn't impossible, just hard, since it requires somebody to reinvent (or rediscover) the comparison algorithm. This is the sort of problem people write PhD theses about. For now, these new tools should get you about 90% of the way there.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Well sure, that would be the utlimate. In fact since there's an STV comparison command already, I never quite understood why Studio didn't have a compare-and-export option built in from the getgo.

Agreed, I've always been waiting/wanting an easier way to do imports, the ultimate would be modules or plugins that could be easilly removed...

Doing it as an add-on isn't impossible, just hard, since it requires somebody to reinvent (or rediscover) the comparison algorithm. This is the sort of problem people write PhD theses about. For now, these new tools should get you about 90% of the way there.

I know, hence the big