On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 jbv <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Today I've been playing with groups in MC and found
> it quite frustrating, for 2 main reasons (if I missed
> anything please MC gurus enlighten me) :
>
> - the only way to group controls is to select them first,
> which makes grouping/ungrouping on the fly via script
> quite cumbersome : you need to set the selected of each
> control to true, then group, then set the selected of all
> controls back to false. And if you don't wznt your controls
> to be selected on screen during the process, you have to
> perform a lock screen / unlock screen...
> Frankly, I miss the groups in OMO where you could group
> any number of objects by simply listing them in a variable
> (the same kind of list that you get with the selectedobjects)...
> The good side of it was that the same object could be part
> of different groups at the same time...
Frankly I'm a little mystified that it's possible to consider the
concept of a group in OMO to be anything other than an ugly hack. You
get none of the benefits of groups in MetaCard (e.g., clipping,
scrolling, nesting, handler and attribute inheritance, and the ability
to place them on different cards like backgrounds), they're also
purely extent-based both for selection and manupulation, and not even
really objects at all, just (as you've pointed out) some sort of
disembodied list of objects that should be moved together.
Nevertheless, being able to specify a list of controls to group (as in
"group button 1 and field 2") is a useful feature, which is why it was
implemented in MetaCard years ago. Why it wasn't documented at that
time I'm not as sure about, but I'll bug report this so it will be for
the 2.4 doc.
> - it looks like grouping controls changes the numbering of
> those controls : for instance I have 50 images on screen and
> the user can select any of them (like image 12 to 25 and 37
> to 42) and they're supposed to get automatically grouped.
> What happens is that all images being in a group are
> re-numbered ! Therefore I had no choice but to change
> my scripts and use the id instead...
Probably not a bad idea in general: referring to objects by number is
exceedingly brittle and can result in maintenance nightmares if you
ever have to change the application by adding or deleting a control.
> Is there any *good* reason for that kind of behavior ?
Yes: groups are real objects in MetaCard, so the controls have to be
children of the group, which of course means they also have to be
contiguous. This also helps with setting up keyboard navigation so
you don't have to worry about creating a situation where you tab into
a group and then back out when navigating a set of radio buttons.
Regards,
Scott
> Thanks. JB
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
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