InterBase Development Studio enables you to noticeably speed up your coding. This article will show you a couple of features available in stored procedures and triggers editor.

Code templates and bookmarks 

Code templates are very handy for inserting widely used block of code. One of the predefined template is "ins" which will be expanded to 

INSERT INTO |()
VALUES () 

where "|" means cursor position right after template expansion. Templates may also include bookmarks. Bookmark is a point where you can quickly move cursor. In the editor window they appear as a small triangles. Press Alt+Up to move to the previous bookmark and Alt+Down to move to the next one. The full definition of the above example looks like: 

INSERT INTO | (#)
VALUES (#) 

where # means bookmark. So just after typing "ins" and <space> you may start typing table name. After that you may press Alt+Down and type column names, Alt+Down again and type column values. Code completion will move this algorithm to the next level.

Intellectual code completion

We call our code completion "intellectual" because it does not simply show full list of keywords and table names. The drow-down list contains only essential items. For example, you just typed INSERT and press Ctrl+Space to invoke code completion. You will see only "INTO" suggession because no other syntax is valid here. The great feature of the code completion in InterBase/Firebird Development Studio is the ability to generate list of table columns and corresponding variables. Check out the following example that uses code template "ins" and code completion:

Automatic variable creation

But the code templates and completion are not only things that could speed up your developent. Please take a closer look at the final page of the example:

As you can see, all variables are marked by red color. These variables are undefined in the procedure/trigger. Now you have to manually create all variables typing their names and defining their data type. Interbase Development Studio offers much better way. Right-click on any of the highlighted variable and check context menu:

The last item says "Autocreate undefined variables". Yes, it will check the procedure code, collect undefined variables, determine their data types and create them. In this example data type for each variable can be easily detected by corresponding table columns.

The example above contains only 4 columns. But what if your table contains  20? Imagine how much time you can save with all these features.