Dear Xailer user,

As you can surely imagine due this post title, the next version of Xailer (2.5) will include Intellisense (code completion) support like other well known development environments.

Xailer will probably become the first development environment for [x]Harbour that supports Intellisense and not only on functions, but also on classes and class members at any hierarchy level, and on the Xailer RTL but also on all the projects and subprojects the user may have open.

We believe that today, this functionality is a must on any developing environment that wants to become a real professional tool and in fact it has been one of the most important demands from people coming from other environments like Visual FoxPro or Visual Basic.

The work has not been easy, since as you surely know, [x]Harbour, like Clipper, is not a strict typing language. So all the work has had to be done analyzing deeply the source code, as fast as possible so the code editor do not become slow due this extra work.

Since [x]Harbour is not strict typed language some times, for Intellisense to work you must give some aid to Xailer IDE indicating the type of a variable or member class.

As you can see on the image, when we define the variable oVar we have indicated that its type is TForm2. This way the IDE knows that the class has a property with the name oLabel1 and the type of that property is TLabel, therefore it shows a listbox with all the members of the TLabel class, indicating which are properties, methods or events. The clause AS can be introduced on variable declarations, function and methods parameters and also on class data declarations.

In order to complete the Intellisense process you can push the ‘:’ key indicating a new object, the ‘(‘ key to start the parameters passing or simply by pressing the Return key.

The Calltips support has been extended to include not only [x]Harbour and Xailer functions, but also all the methods and events of the complete Xailer hierarchy, including your user classes and functions. If you want that from your functions and methods the return value is shown on the calltip you must include that information as a comment on the function or method declaration using the following construction: //-->

FUNCTION AtoC( aData ) // --> cString

Actually, Xailer 2.5 is been hardly tested for a reduce group of selected Xailer users. We expect to publish it in a really short term. Keep tuned.

Best regards.

Xailer Team