multiple loading of the same table

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010, Ivan Zolotukhin wrote:

> Mark,
> 
> > Most existing tools (word processors, spreadsheets, acroread, etc),
> > when you ask them to load a file, load it, even if you just did the
> > same thing a minute ago.
> 
> You wrong here. OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader
> (tried 2 versions with default settings), Gedit, Komodo, Adobe
> Photoshop, ..., only bring a focus on previously opened object and do
> not allow 2 instances of the same object to be opened. Only few
> applications, either old-fashioned (or simply designed without taking
> into account trivial usability principles), or where user directly
> controls the interface containers of the objects (think tabs in
> browsers), will open objects multiple times.

Ivan,

my apologies, it seems you're quite right.  I did think I'd checked
acroread at least before making the above assertion, but evidently not
(and I should have thought twice before making pronouncements about
word processors and spreadsheets, since it's a couple of decades since
I've really used either).

Where to go from there ... well, SAMP-friendly applications 
which do behave in the non-old-fashioned way will probably do what
you want and refuse to perform multiple loads of the same item.
Others will probably operate in the old-fashioned way for both 
SAMP and user-initiated loads, i.e. load a new copy each time, 
regardless of ID.

Again, happy to hear opinions of third parties about this.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/