So you've organized your Custom Menu, but you're about to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Frontier. So you need to export your Custom Menu and its associated scripts, just in case.
If your scripts are all in the user table, you at least know where to look for them. But which scripts do you need? Which are called from your Custom Menu?
Hmmm.... And what's that script; you don't recognize it at all....
Unless you also enforce some order on your Custom scripts, your user table can quickly become a nightmare to maintain or update.
Maintaining the Illusion of Order
UserLand has set aside the user table for your custom information. This includes your personalized configurations for the Frontier and third-party tools you use. It also includes any other information you want to save--especially your Custom scripts. That's why your Custom Menu is in the user table.
When you want to add a new tool to your Custom Menu, you could simply create/paste the script directly into the menu item script. Then you could automatically export the tool scripts, by simply exporting the menu itself. However, this can make debugging more difficult. And sometimes, several tools will need to do almost the same thing; in this case, a single script called from the different menu item scripts with different parameters may be preferable.
But if you just dump all your Custom scripts into the user table, it can be difficult to be certain you've accounted for all of them when you need to back them up or export them before you upgrade, or when you need to transfer them to another machine.
What works best for me, and may for you, is to create a new subtable inside the user table, user.command, and place all my Custom scripts inside this subtable. Then when I need to export these scripts for whatever reason (usually to update them on another machine), I can simply export the entire user.command table. I know I have them all, because that's where they all live.
Most of my menu item scripts then consist of simple function calls to the scripts in user.command.
You may even want to use subtables inside user.command. That way if you want to send a friend (or one of the ScriptMeridian mailing lists) some of your tools, they're easy to find.
So now we'll summarize this Custom Menu Management Approach.
Page 1: The Custom Menu
Page 2: Organizing Your Custom Menu
Page 3: Organizing Your Custom Scripts
Page 4: Custom Menu Management Approach
Page 5: How to Clone Your Custom Menu
Page 6: A Few More Tips
Page 7: About the Author
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