Units

This section deals with units of measure and how they are used in Resort Bistro.

Recipes, for both cultural and historical reasons use some weird and wonderful units. Take a look at any recipe book and you'll see what we mean. Examples like 'a pinch of salt', 'a quarter bunch of parsley', 'two celery stalks', 'season to taste', etc. are all easy enough to understand when standing in a kitchen, but when it comes to calculating recipe costs, they are there just to make our lives difficult.

When designing our programs we decided to let you, the user, use any unit of measure virtually anywhere in the program. In order to achieve this degree of flexibility, we needed to implement a system whereby the program could cope with converting between any two units that you could throw at it. Each unit in Resort Bistro is assigned a type. A unit's type determines how the program handles converting between that unit and any other unit.

Each unit also has a style. These unit styles let Resort Bistro change the units used in a recipes from say metric to British units.

Unit types and unit styles are discussed below.

Unit Types

As far as Resort Bistro is concerned there are three fundamental types of unit; Weight, Volume, and Culinary units.

Weight units are any standard weight unit of measure. When you create a new database with the Database Wizard, the program automatically creates the following weight units:- 'gram', 'kilogram', 'pound', 'ounce', 'pound (Troy)', 'ounce (Troy)', and 'slug'.

Volume units are any standard volume unit of measure. When you create a new database with the Database Wizard, the program automatically creates the following volume units:- 'litre', 'gallon (UK)', 'gallon (US)', 'millilitre', 'ounce, fluid(UK)', 'ounce, fluid(US)', 'pint', 'quart', 'tablespoon', and 'teaspoon'.

Culinary units are those units than don't fit into the weight and volume types. When you create a new database with the Database Wizard, the program automatically creates the following culinary units:- 'unit', 'dozen', 'half dozen', 'piece', 'cover', 'portion', 'serve'. Any units that you add to your databases automatically become culinary units.

Resort Bistro can automatically convert between any two weight units (i.e. grams to pounds). The program can also automatically convert between any two volume units (i.e. litres to gallons). What the program can't do automatically is:-

•Convert from a weight to a volume.

•Convert from a weight to a culinary unit.

•Convert from a volume to a culinary unit.

The way that Resort Bistro copes with unit conversion is discussed in detail in the following topics:

•How do unit conversions work?

•What are 'deferred unit conversions'?

•Unit Conversion Wizard

Unit Styles

As mentioned above, units are assigned styles. There are three styles that Resort Bistro applies to units; Metric, British, and American.

Unit styles only apply to weight and volume units. You nominate your preferred 'local' units in the Local Unit Preferences Property Page of the File Preferences dialog for a database. The choices are Metric, British, or American. This lets Resort Bistro know what style of unit you prefer to work with.

At a later point in the program, Resort Bistro can change units actually used in recipes from the style in which they were entered to your preferred local style.

For instance, you might have some recipes that you entered into a Resort Bistro database from a British cook book. These recipes probably used units like pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, etc. If you prefer to work in metric units, you can have Resort Bistro change the British units used in the recipe to metric units, automatically adjusting the ingredient quantities from British to metric as well. You end up with the recipe that you want, with their ingredient quantities converted to units that you are familiar with.

Changing a recipe's unit style is done with the Convert to Preferred Units Dialog.