I had an idea for a feature request, but before I put it into the feedback system, I thought I'd put it up here for discussion first.
Here's the problem: I'm writing, say, a simulator for an industrial machine. I want the simulator window to be as life-like as possible, so I've created several custom controls with photographs of the actual machine control as the graphic for the custom control. I need to lay out several of each type in the simulator window, but when I drag them into the window in the IDE, all I get are empty black rectangles, because that's how Canvas and its subclasses display. I could manually go through and set the background picture on each canvas so that it displays the right image, but that's tedious, and with dozens of empty black rectangles, there's a chance I might goof up and apply the wrong background picture to the wrong control. What would be nice would be if I could specify, when I create the subclass, what preview image it should display. It would have to be a property I could set in the Code Editor, though, because when I create a subclass of Canvas, I can only edit in the Code editor. I was originally thinking of asking to set aside "IDEPreviewScript" as a reserved property name -- if you create a subclass of Canvas with a String property named IDEPreviewScript, have the WindowEditor execute that script whenever an instance of your subclass was placed, moved, or resized within a window. But the more I think about it, the more I'd prefer to see a Custom Control Editor that would work like the Menu Editor or ToolBar Editor. It would only work on subclasses of Canvas, and would let you apply a preview picture to the empty rectangle that is the default Canvas display in the IDE. This preview picture would only display in the IDE (though of course you could pick the same image for both the preview pic and the live pic), and would not be compiled into the run-time (unless it was being used by the "live" code). You could set the top/left location of the preview pic, and whether it crops or scales when you resize the canvas in the IDE. What do you folks think? Good idea? Prefer one to the other? Never use custom controls? Once I get some feedback I'll see about posting this as an official feature request. Mark Nutter Quick and easy regex creation and debugging! http://www.bucktailsoftware.com/products/regexplorer/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
