MapInfo Pro

It doesn't seem obvious how you "run" a MapBasic tool! When you Load a Registered Tool it just puts it into the Running List and it's not that intuitive how to then run it (having thought you already had). Improvement required?

Hi John,

not sure what exactly you are aiming at.

Applications have always been responsible for embedded themselves into the interface.

Earlier most tools would add their features to the Tools menu. This has changes with the ribbon interface. If they added menu items to the Tools menu, these will now appear as a context menu on the tool itself in the Tools window.

We have discussed if we in some way could make this more visible to the use, for instance by showing these as buttons below the tool in the Tools window.

With the 17.0.1 patch we will make it easier to add buttons to the ribbon interface. You will be able to use the Alter Buttonpad statement to add a button to a specific group on a specific tab. I'm sure many MapBasic developers will find this very helpful as it makes it easier to make a basic integration of the tools into the ribbon interface.

Take an example - Distance Calculator. It is listed under the "Registered" tab and the first button indicates "Load Tool (Run)". But it doesn't run the tool - it loads it under the "Running" tab. User then needs to Open/run the tool. Which isn't obvious...

Are you just talking about words here, John? Load instead of Run?

Or would you expect the tool to actually open the Distance Calculator window when you run it from the Registered tab?

Well yes. Confusing when the button says:- Load Tool (Run)

and nothing happens. So you go searching for buttons and ribbons that may have been loaded. In fact, you still need to run the program. Not sure why there are 2 stages??

There has always been two states - or again this depends on the application.

Sometimes an application just does one thing and the developer has decided it just does it when it gets loaded (when the user runs it 😉 )

In other cases the tool has been designed to work well with Autoloading. This means that you can load the tool and it's ready to do the work when you need it. So the tool embeds itself in the interface when you run it. Maybe it adds an additional button to the MAP tab or maybe it adds a menu item to the MAP context menu. This is up to the developer to decide - where should the "action points" of the tool be.

The tool might actually do more than just one thing. Which thing should it do when it's loaded?

But your question is actually quite good. With the later versions of MapInfo Pro, a tool can have a default action. We could consider adding a new option for the tools to load the tool and execute the default action. For some tools this would make sense - for others it wouldn't make sense.

Understood Peter. I think it could be made clearer between "loading" and "running" from the Tool Manager too.

I like the idea too. When a tool is run (but not if autoloaded) it could have its default action run. Probably we would specify this via tool metadata or special functions.

Yep, that would make it easier 👍