Naming Conventions

Ffenics consultants will nag on about not using reserved words, adopting single word naming conventions and so on, but the truth is that DataEase and Ffenics are so resillient to these mistakes that 95% of the time you can probably get away with them.

We'll still laugh at you, of course, unless it's your round.

But I did just come across an instance where idiosyncratic nomenclature aims its teeth at your derriere: punctuation such as brackets (or parenthesis) confuse attempts to write object scripts.

Every book on computing you'll ever read will tell you to stick to single word names, but if you managed to skip those pages, or are looking after an app created by AN Other, then there is a workaround: use the 'object name' option on the field definition dialog, and change the object name at least to a single word.

Ff uses the field name from the form/table to be the default name for the object on a form or aspect that displays the data. It also uses the same name for summary field objects. You cannot have objects with the same name in the same container, but the corresponding summary object for a regular field object will be created in the form container, not in the record container, so there is no immediate confusion. Still, not a bad idea, if you are likely to do a lot of scripting on a document that has summary variables, to rename them to something easier to spot in the script object list.