PG Software Development

Developers have reported experiencing memory related ToolBook crashes when using the PowerPac.

QUESTION is whether the PowerPac is the reason for these problems.

ANSWER: The short answer is NO.
The PowerPac adds over 110 functions into the ToolBook authoring environment and makes them available to the Actions Editor system. As these functions are added to events/actions of objects, the ToolBook authoring system will add over 110 user-related properties to each object which references a PowerPac function. This ToolBook behavior quickly fills up the object/page memory space, which is already somewhat limited in ToolBook. To compensate for this, the PowerPac deletes these references, most of which are not needed during authoring. This keeps memory space optimized and your books and pages should work fine and the actions system should not experience memory-related issues.

Where the problem comes in is when developers begin adding their own js files with many functions. The PowerPac will NOT optimize the user property space which quickly fills up when developers create many functions of their own.

To correct this deficiency, PowerPac v13.025+ will now optimize user property space for any user-added functions. Users have successfully added over 150 functions of their own along with the PowerPac function set and have been able to continue developing their projects with memory-related problems.

HOWEVER, we recommend making use of the PowerPac's XML engine to dynamically add functions to your projects. These functions can be called using PowerPac's pgTBObjSet() and will enable developers to add an unlimited number of user functions to your projects and never hit the memory maximum imposed by the ToolBook authoring environment. Plus XML files are compressed during export and load very quickly at runtime.
In addition, please realize that the PowerPac probably already includes nearly any subset of functions which make creating lots of user function unnecessary.