opening windows on startup

[ewinger]

I found this while perusing old bugs. It's been around awhile, but I'd like to know the reasoning and a work-around for this.

When I open windows which are not EtWindow's, they are not reopened when I save the image and restart. For example, an instance of a subclass of AbtAppBldrView.

This is because in EtWindowSystemStartUp class>>openWindows, there is an explicit check for EtWindow's.

According to the bug report in our system, this was a deliberate change many years ago.

It would be nice if our windows opened up after an image save, so I'd like to know what the recommended (& perhaps easiest) way to fix this would be.

Thanks.

[Eric Clayberg]

VAST has worked this way pretty much for as long as I remember. If this was a change in behavior at some point, it dates back to the early 90's. I started using VAST in '92 or '93, and I don't remember it being any different (granted, that was a very long time ago). Personally, I like the fact that it works this way and do not consider it to be a bug. if the system persisted arbitrary user-create windows, I think it would become much more fragile and prone to crashing on startup.

EtWindowSystemStartUp is only responsible for re-opening EtWindows, and there is quite a lot of code specific to EtWindows which persists their state and restores them. Other apps like AbtBaseWindowSystemStartUp take responsibility for re-opening other windows (like AbtApplicationsOrganizerView). All the hooks are there to allow any app to persist its own windows, if it wants to.

So, in my opinion, the recommended way to handle this for your own windows is to either save and restore them same way that EtWindowSystemStartUp handles its windows or simply subclass EtWindow and use the EtWindowSystemStartUp persistence framework as-is. That is what we did with all of the VA Assist enhanced browsers back in 1998.

[ewinger]

Ok, thanks.

Yeah, I knew it was old, ancient even. But I thought maybe if it was straight forward I could change our window behavior. I'll take a look at the window managing code you mentioned when I get a chance to see if its reasonably easy to make our windows persist.