The TSW Blog

A lot of people have been requesting more options in the convert menu, so with WebCoder 2010, this menu has gone from a few items to currently 11 items, as you can see on the screenshot.

The lowercase and uppercase functions are probably well known from WebCoder 2009, but the Capitalize function is new. It simply capitalizes each word in the selected text.

The new comment functions are all context-sensitive, so they will use the proper comment notification depending on which language your cursor is currently placed in.

The list functions existed as scripts in previous versions of WebCoder, but to make them easier to find and use, I have included them in the menu.

The next two options are inspired by a user request. The first one will take the selected lines and place each of them inside a PHP echo statement, while escaping quotes if necessary. The second one will do the exact opposite.

The last one is a bit special. It allows you to select a PHP string and then have it escaped properly. It will both add and remove escaping as necessary, to give you a valid string. It might need some fine-tuning, but I think it's a pretty useful little feature :)

So, what else do we need, guys? Let me know what you think!

SQL IntelliSense was actually on my TODO list for WebCoder 2009, but I couldn't quite figure out the right way to do it. The easy way would have been to provide IntelliSense for SQL keywords in the Database result window, but that wasn't enough. Here's a couple of screenshots of the most basic functionality, helping you write SQL for the Database part of WebCoder much faster and more efficient:

As you can see, you get IntelliSense for both keywords and MySQL functions. Parameter hinting is implemented as well:

That's all very nice for writing and testing your SQL, but with help from the help of Inline SQL highlighting, we can actually provide the same IntelliSense directly in your code:

It tries to detect when you write a string that is likely SQL and then highlights it as such. I think this is pretty cool, but the next screenshot is really what it's all about:

When you attach a database to your project, or simply have one open in the "Databases" panel, WebCoder will read all the tables and their columns and keep them in memory, allowing you to access them through IntelliSense. It will use your aliases and propose table names, aliases and even columns for tables. I have using this feature for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it - I hope you will too! Let me know what you think :)