Keep track of your application's graphic files

A simple utility to help you manage the icons, bitmaps and other graphics that you use in your application

One of the more difficult tasks in a Visual FoxPro development project is keeping track of the many icons, bitmaps and other graphic files that you use in the application. In a typical project, you probably use hundreds - even thousands - of these files. You use them for the Icon property of your forms, for the Picture property of your command buttons, and in many other places where you want to add interest and visual effect to your interface. Some of the files will be ICOs, others will be BMPs, GIFs, JPGs or any other of the 17 graphic formats that VFP natively supports.

Managing these files is a headache. In our own projects, we typically test several different icons for a particular function, then forget to delete the ones we rejected, resulting in unwanted files cluttering the directory. When working in a multi-programmer team, we often find that each programmer chooses his or her own graphics, so we end up with different images being used for the same purpose. And if a graphic file goes missing, we sometimes only find out about it when a user complains.

To help solve these and related problems, we've created a simple Review Bitmaps utility that compares the graphic files in your project directories with those that are actually used in the application. This is a great tool for helping get rid of the unused files that clutter up a typical bitmaps folder. It's also very useful for identifying missing files, and for generally keeping track of which bitmap files contain which images. (We use the term 'bitmaps' here to mean any icon or graphic files, not just those in Windows Bitmap [BMP] format.)

As with all the utilities and components in Foxstuff, the Review Bitmaps tool is completely free. Just follow the link below to download it. Note that Review Bitmaps requires VFP 8.0 or above.

Getting started

Installing Review Bitmaps is trivial. Just unpack the downloaded file to a suitable directory on your development machine. Once you've done that, proceed as follows:

Launch VFP (8.0 or above).
Set the default directory or the search path to the directory into which you unpacked the downloaded file.
In the command window, type DO FORM Review_Bitmaps. The form shown in Figure 1 will appear.

Figure 1: The utility's main form

Using Code References

In order for Review Bitmaps to do anything useful, it has to know which graphic files are referenced from the code in your application. Rather than searching your programs, forms and classes itself for that information, it relies on VFP's Code References tool to do the job.

So the first step in using Review Bitmaps is to launch Code References. You can do that from the VFP Tools menu, but it's easier to do it by clicking the hyperlink near the top of the form. When you do, Review Bitmaps will automatically enter the required search string in the Look For box, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Code References Search window, with the Look For box already filled in

Next, make the following settings in Code References:

Specify your application's project or folder.
Set the file types to Common or All Source.
Select Regular Expressions (this is important).
Do not select Match Case or Match Whole Word.
Set Comments to Ignore Comments.

If you launched Code References from the Tools menu, you will also have to enter the search string, which is as follows:

(\.ani)|(\.bmp)|(\.cur)|(\.dib)|(\.emf)|(\.exif)|
(\.gif)|(\.gfa)|(\.ico)|(\.jpg)|(\.jpeg)|(\.jpe)|
(\.jfif)|(\.png)|(\.tif)|(\.tiff)|(\.wmf)

This is a regular expression that locates filenames with any of the extensions applicable to graphic files. Note that, in this web page, the search string has been split over three lines to improve readability. You should enter it in the Look In box as a single string.

Next, go ahead and run the search.

When the search has finished, export the results to a DBF file of your choice. To do so, click the Export button on the Code References toolbar, select Visual FoxPro Table (DBF) as the output file type, and specify the filename to hold the exported results.

At this point, you can close Code References.

Back in the Review Bitmaps form, enter the path and filename of the export file that you just created, and the path of the directory containing your application's graphics files. Tick the 'Include subfolders' checkbox if applicable.

Choose your outputs

Review Bitmaps offers three outputs:

A list of unused graphics files, that is, those files that are present in your graphics directory but are not referenced from your application. These files are candidates for deletion.

A list of missing graphics files, that is, those files that are referenced in the application but are not present in the graphics directory. This list will help you to ensure that all the required files are available at compile time.

A list of all the files present in the directory, showing the actual images. This report is an excellent tool for finding out exactly what images you possess. It's also useful for finding duplicate image files in different sub-folders. (Note that this option doesn't require the Code References export file; if you only want to produce this report, you can skip the Code References search and export steps.)

All three of the above outputs are available as VFP reports, which you can preview or print directly from the Review Bitmaps form. The first two outputs can also be viewed as simple on-screen listings which can optionally be copied to the clipboard or saved to a text file.

To obtain any of the above outputs, just press the appropriate button on the form.

Interpret with care

We have found Review Bitmaps to be an enormous help in our own projects, but it's not perfect. In some cases, Code References will fail to identify a graphics file - often because its name is constructed dynamically in the program code. In those cases, Review Bitmaps will incorrectly report that the file in question is unused.

Code References might also flag what it thinks is a graphics file but is in fact something else. For example, if your code refers to an object named Report that has property called BMP, any references to Report.BMP will be treated as a filename. This will lead Review Bitmaps to mistakenly report a missing file.

For these reasons, you should interpret the output from Review Bitmaps with care. In particular, be careful not to permanently delete any file unless you know for sure that it's not needed.

FOXSTUFF