External Operations Kinds

There are two kinds of external operations:

• External operations which use a Result window: in this case the operation typically does not modify the source code or designer of the files which it operates on, but it examines their contents and generates some output in a Result window. For example, the Review Control Text Spelling operation provided as example belongs to this category: it shows spelling errors in the text of controls in the Result Window. See Adding Output to the Result Window.

Apart from the command that executes the operation, the operations of this kind have an additional command under the View | Other Windows menu to show the result window at any moment.

• External operations which don't use a Result window: in this case the operation modifies in some manner the source code or designer of the files which it operates on. For example, the Format Code operation that formats each file according to some criteria.

Since the operations of this kind do modify documents, they should provide an option to keep open the modified documents, to allow undo if the user wants to revert the operation on a document. See Providing User Options.