Menuhistory bug?

[Scott Raney]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2002 David Epstein <depstein at att.net> wrote:

> Is this a well known bug?  Is it being fixed?

It's a known limitation. We don't classify it a bug because
menuHistory is not a core function of pulldowns or popups, it's
designed for option and tabbed menus.  It's not planned to be changed
because of the way these menus are implemented on MacOS (there is no
place to store the line number information in the MacOS menu
structures).

> (MC 2.4 under Mac OS 9.2)
> 
> A hierarchical pull-down menu does not properly set its "menuhistory" when a
> selection is made from a submenu.  The "menuhistory" value remains what was
> set the last time a selection was made from the first level of the menu.
> 
> I know that I can use the parameter passed by "menupick" to get the contents
> of the menu choice and submenu choice; but I want the position of those
> choices, because I cannot be sure that the content will unambiguously
> indicate the position.  (That is, it is possible that the same content will
> appear in several positions yet require a different scripted response).

I'd say this is your real problem.  If you have multiple lines that
are identical in a button-contents menu, you've got a serious design
flaw and ought to concentrate on a UI redesign so that this isn't a
requirement.  It's only going to be confusing to the user.  If only
the lowest level elements are identical, it's straightforward to
recover the full path to the line using the lineOffset function (you
just have to step over each |-delimited item in the parameter to
menuPick).

> This is a frustrating bug because the "menuhistory" DOES at least report the
> sub-menu choice position if the button style is popup rather than pulldown.
> (Even in this case, however, there is no record of the position of the main
> menu choice).  But it appears that for a menu to be part of a group that
> will be displayed in the Mac menubar it must have the "pulldown" style.

The same limitations should apply to popups in the native look and
feel setting on MacOS, though, because these use the same OS
structures.
  Regards,
    Scott

> Thanks for any insights on this.
> 
> David Epstein

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Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
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