Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Family Editor - Parameter Order

In the past Scott Hopkins shared a method (at AUGI) to reorder parameters.

If you block out some generic parameters names up front you can assure a certain order at will and avoid the re-order hassle. It can be a bit difficult perhaps to anticipate what parameter you might need but a little planning can make a big difference.

Here's an example: Creating a new table family I expect to need four new dimension parameters but haven't settled on the names or maybe I have but I want them in a precise order. Create the parameters first like this.

Once they are created they'll stay in this order no matter what you change their names to later. After I work through things I can change their names to these.

If I had tried to create these names up front they would have looked like this.

If you can't plan ahead enough, then Scott's method to the rescue!

(This approach doesn't work for Shared Parameters, though. Neither will the Re-order technique since Shared Parameters are already created technically.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Using parameter names a, b, c, d... to "block out" parameters will order them above a list of existing parameters.

Using parameter names 1, 2, 3, 4... to "block out" parameters will order them below a list of existing parameters.