Contributing code to Suran Systems, Inc.'s repositories

How to contribute

Pull requests are more than welcome! Once you've developed your changes in Omnis, update the src/[project] directory with a new JSON export of your library and submit the pull request. If your pull request is approved, the maintainers will manually merge your changes into the libraries under lib.

Conventions

Suran uses several coding conventions that may be foreign to some Omnis developers. When contributing, please try to adhere to these standards.

Protected methods and variables in Omnis

Omnis does not natively offer a protected method or variable, which a method or variable that can be accessed by the current class or its subclasses only. In the course of adding unit tests to Omnis code, we found a need to be able to protect code like a private method does, but still invoke it from a test class, like a public method. We use an underscore to indicate a method or variable is protected:

• $public
• $_protected
• private

Hungarian notation

We prefix Omnis classes and variables to indicate their type, scope, and purpose in the application. Bash and Powershell scripts are less strict in following these prefixes.

Variables

Scope	Prefix
Task	t
Class	c
Instance	i
Local	l
Parameter	p

Type	Prefix
Binary	[bn]
Boolean	b
Character	c
Field Reference	f[prefix for the destination variable's expected type], e.g. pfcName
Integer	i
Item Reference	ir
List	l
Number	n
Object Reference	or
Object	o
Picture	[p]
Row	r

Classes

Type	Prefix
Code	c
File	f
Menu	m
Object	o
Query	q
Remote Form	rf
Remote Task	rt
Report	r
Schema	s
Search	(we don't use these)
Table	t
Task	k
Toolbar	b
Windows	w

Module	Prefix
Level 0 Superclass (does not require a user session in the application)	0
Level 1 Superclass (expect an authenticated user session in the application)	1
Level N Superclass (targeted superclass for a specific program area)	N
General	g
Developer	d
Smart field designed to represent data via a subwindow's $dataname property	_

NOTE: Module prefixing is used internally in our commercial products. While we don't require these prefixes for open-source projects, you may encounter these prefixes. They're noted here to explain what they mean.

Examples

• An object with a character instance variable would be oFoo.icBar.
• A smartfield for showing text in a console format would be wg_Console.

Quotes

Please use double quotes to quote literal values in Omnis code. In scripts, double-quote any variable and wrap them in ${} to handle proper expansion.