Big project lagging

MIT App Inventor Help
1

so i have a big project (5k blocks) and when i want to move around the blocks or add blocks the time reaction is around 6 seconds every time. and is there any way to split the project to smmaler project and export apk all projects or do something that will not make it lagging

2

the general advice is DRY - Don't repeat yourself

reuse your blocks, use procedures and the advanced features
also you can try to use another browser (which one are you using currently) and collapse your blocks and only expand those blocks you are workig on

Taifun

1 Like
3

When you have too many blocks spread out over too large a surface area,
the Blocks Editor hits a complexity limit when it tries to generate a blocks.png file for the screen.

There are two main approaches to deal with this:

  • Start a Google Doc with a Table of Contents explaining your app, with sections for Design, Data, Code, including Downloaded Png images of all Events, Procedures, Globals, and with html cross-links for easy navigation. Such a doc becomes easier to read than a complete blocks image, because you have FIND, Next, PREV, back functionality, and you can add paragraphs of commentary around your code. This is my preferred life saver when doing a very large complex app. If you go this route, try to arrange your blocks geographically in a column matching the order of your Table of Contents, then do periodic Clean Up Blocks to pull them inline. This sometimes lowers the load on the Blocks Editor.
  • Reduce your block count:
    • Use parametrized procedures for common code
    • Use Media text files instead of big clumps of text blocks
    • Use generic blocks instead of repeating component event blocks
    • Encode repeating decision patterns into lookup tables loaded from Media csv text files (does your blocks image look like a box of combs?)
1 Like