Globals

Globals are your main components. If you go to charta.data and press enter, a table with all your globals will be opened. For the demo these are: Programming, Debug output, Ad hoc functions, Main functions, Classes, Projects, Persons, Weekly tasks, Days of the week and Planning.

So your functions and classes are part of your globals. But more importantly your data is part of it in the form of data objects. Every data you put in a global object will be accessible and consistent from all over the application. And within the explorer you can see the most recent state of it.

In the introduction you saw how you can add data to a global by inserting your own project. The state of the global was directly updated. We are now going to add a new global itself.

• Select a row in the globals table

Use Windows+Left/Right/Up/Down to get to the table and Left/Right/Up/Down to walk through the table.

• Press Ctrl+Insert to insert a row at the end of the table

This adds the global, which you can see in the explorer by collapsing and expanding charta.data.

• Go to the first column and give the global the name "Priority"
• Go to the second column and specify the type of the global as Text

By pressing Ctrl+Shift a drop-down list will appear with all the possible types. If you type a few letters the list will be filtered for the options that have the letter combination in it somewhere.

• Select the row and press Enter

A new tab will be opened for the global.

• Type some text, like "This task is urgent!"

If your application looks like this




you successfully added a global.

We now have created a new global based on an already defined class, but what should we do to create a new class? The next example does exactly that. We will show you how to create the class Notes so that you can add some information to a task.

Lessons learned

• Some rehearsal in navigation and the use of the standard charta controls
• Adding globals to you application
• A first use of types and collections in charta