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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
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If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
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Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

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Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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looking for consultant

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    #1

    looking for consultant

    Over the past 2 years I have developed a database for recordkeeping. I want to resell this program, but I need some assistance finishing it up. The program works on my pc but not after making a runtime user copy. I lose some backround pics, the help dropdown refers to Alpha, etc. My biggest problem is I am on disability and can not afford much. Please help or advise.
    Mel
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: looking for consultant

    I am very surprised that I recieved not one response to my request. Are ALL the consultants and knowlegeable programmers that busy that they can't even offer a suggestion? If the suggestion (like the last time I entered a request for help) is GO AWAY!!! sorry, I will finish this program come hell or high water.

    Comment

      #3
      RE: looking for consultant

      Mel

      I think the problem is not that no one wants to help, but more likely that they don't know exactly what to suggest to help. Converting a single user program to a saleable product is a very big undertaking with many facets, from careful testing, to creating an install program, creating packaging, writing help, and on and on. One of the big issues is ensuring a novice user can use the product and not "break it". It is amazing what the new user might try to do with the product. They will find ways to "mess it up" that you can not imagine.

      The nature of your issues suggest that the problems are mainly path issues. This is a very common error when building a single user, standalone project. However, when you move to a more distributed environment, you must use relative paths. This mean either keeping everything in the database folder or some subfolder relative to the database folder. Then you can use functions like a5_get_path() to set a path relative to the database. For example, if your database is in the folder

      c:\my database

      and you have images in a folder

      c:\my database\images

      you can use this path to a file named "logo.bmp"

      a5_get_path()+"\images\logo.bmp"

      If the databse path changes, this will still work as long as the image folder is a sub folder under the database folder. If you moved the database to

      d:\server\another database

      and the images resided in

      d:\server\another database\images

      a5_get_path()+"\images\logo.bmp"

      will still find the images.

      Jerry

      Comment

        #4
        RE: looking for consultant

        When creating the runtime, there is a dialog box to include additional files. In that box, yoiu should include all of the files that you would use in the full version, ie: bitmaps, backgrounds, etc. The runtime builder knows which tables and associated files to build with the database application, but not additional files. You need to tell it which files. We use the "sand" bitmap for our background in our applications. I have found that it is best to make it an embedded bitmap instead of a file or library. For some reason, the runtime is not affected adversely when the bitmap is embedded. The path to your custom helps must also be available to the runtime, so you must copy them as well.

        This should get you on your way.

        Tom

        Comment

          #5
          RE: looking for consultant

          Today is the first time I read your post but I'll second Jerry's comment that "Converting a single user program to a saleable product is a very big undertaking with many facets..."

          I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. However, if you've never done it before, you should figure out how much you think it will take then multiply it by 10. That way you probably won't be off by more than a factor of 2 - and, yes, I'm serious!

          I have an application that my customer thought was so good that we decided to make it generic and sell it to others. It took about 80-100 hours to build his initial app. I figured another 100 hours would be needed to get it ready to sell as a generic app. After more than 2 years of development, I now have at least 2500 hours into it - many, many late nights and a wife who occasionally comments about my bigamy with a new spouse called "the computer." At this point there are only 5 users and until about 2-3 months ago I was spending a good part of what seemed like every day fixing problems for them that were often created because each customer did things differently. Can you imagine what it would have been like if I sold it to 20 users? It has to be really solid before you can consider selling a lot of copies. As each fix was implemented, it seemed like something else went wrong. (With over 62,500 lines of code, which is over 2,000,000 characters, just in the global scripts and functions, things can get a bit complex when making changes.) Then, as each fix was truly resolved, somebody else found another issue. Sometimes the issues were simply my mistakes but many times they were because the user just did something that I had never expected. (OK, in a sense you could still say those were "my mistakes" because I didn't allow for all possibilities but my crystal ball is a bit foggy.)

          Besides the real issues, there were also the "but I thought it could do this" issues and the "but I didn't realize it was doing that" and the "but I really, really, need this report/functionality" issues.

          I've worked on two other smaller generic programs....

          - One was a very small project and the person thought it could be done for around $1500 since it was a conversion of something he'd already done in an earlier A5 version - I told him to figure on a minimum of $4000 and probably more. He's currently at $8000 and climbing as new features are found to be 'necessary'.

          - The second guy just wanted some help to get started and was expecting to pay $1000-2000 for the assistance then found that he really couldn't do it on his own - even with the work that he's done (and he continues to work on things like form layouts, general logic, and help files plus he's doing all the marketing, etc.) he has now run up about $5500 in bills for my development work and we still aren't done. Plus, I didn't ask him to pay for some of the work that I initially did for his project but I hope to resell to other developers. (The biggest is my AIMS Reg routines for setting up trial versions and registrations that is nearly ready for "publication." We found a couple bugs today that should be fixed soon - hopefully they're the last. (Another 3-4 hours "wasted" fixing a problem.) The routines aren't guaranteed to keep everyone out but it took me about an hour just to get around the registration problems today at the remote location that is using the runtime only. I had to send new files in order to get around it - and I knew where the protections were and how they worked!)

          Am I ready to work on another generic app? Not for a long time! And, because of past experiences, even then it will only happen if I'm getting well paid for every minute of my time - I consider my hard-earned experience to be well worth the price.

          Cal Locklin
          www.aimsdc.net

          Comment

            #6
            RE: looking for consultant

            Well, that is good College Education from Call and Jerry here. I can only second those opinions from my own experience. I will spare you the stories I can tell....

            One simple addition:
            If you use the Alpha Help function with action scripting, you should know that the path to the help file is hardcoded. So, you run the risk that if the user installs into an unexpected directory, your Helpfiles will not be found.

            Solution/; convert the action script to xbasix, then, adjust the pathname manually and save the button again.
            Problem solved.

            Kind regards,

            Marcel Onck
            Alpha Guild Member
            The Netherlands

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