Jim,
Sorry Jim. I started working with translating the AS book and got a bit obsessed. I enclosed the help and glossary from the database in this post. The current version is A16. These are the latest versions of these documents. I included the help document and glossary document from the database document from the database as 2 separate downloadable files.
The basic idea behind this database, as pretty much all relational databases is searching. Most relational databases have lots of reports but this database does not. I couldn’t think of any helpful reports to do. When you have all records in the current table showing then you do do a search to find what you want. If to many items are still displayed you do another search and so on. For me I mostly use the live searches because of its instant feedback.
Class items is where nearly all the work goes on in the database. I only made the classes and frameworks visible so the user can see what the classes and frameworks are and get a short description of them as well as any notes that would be helpful about classes or frameworks.
All the windows have some for of search. All but one window have live searches (the list of found items changes as the user types. One window has the old style search where you enter something and then search, or search again.
There are windows about inheritance in the database but that is more useful once you are more familiar with ASObj-C.
The examples come in 3 types: beginning, intermediate and advanced. The buttons in the lower right corner of the class items windows have buttons to choose which examples to display. If a button has gray text then there is no samples for that. If the text is black then there is a sample.
The extra topics popup have a few topics that I included that are not directly about about ASObj-C but are helpful things to know or are useful things but a pain in the butt to figure out. Currently it has a few topics: A brief summary of an application bundle, creating spotlight queries, different types of equality, foundation functions, predicate extra info, and stuff in Xcode.
If you want to display info for a single class then use the “only show items for the class” popup in the bottom right of the window is what you would use. If you check out the stuff in the ASObj-C menu the last 6 items have present searches in them to do specific types of searches.
The ASObj-C menu is where the preferences are accessed. Currently there is only 1 preference for the database and it determines which script editor (Script Debugger or Script Editor) is opened when you type shift-command-s which allows the sample to be sent to to the chosen editor where it is then compiled. This command can also be accessed for the ASObj-C menu.
Well that is a quick run down. The help file explains in more detail. If you still have questions let me know.
Bill
ASObj-C database A16 glossary.rtf.zip (8.7 KB)
ASObj-C database A16 help.rtf.zip (7.6 KB)