messages to buttons when the mouse is already down

[Scott Rossi]

On Monday, January 21, 2002, at 02:50 PM, Michael J. Lew wrote:

> I would like to track the movement of the mouse through an array of 
> buttons by hilighting each button that the mouse (button already down) 
> passes over. However, the mouseEnter, mouseMove, mouseWithin messages 
> are only sent to the first button because that button receives the 
> mouseDown event and is the target. Similarly the mouseControl function 
> (yes, it took me a couple of tries to notice that it was a function and 
> not a message!) only returns the target.

Not sure exactly what your difficulty is here.  The mouseEnter and 
mouseLeave messages should be enough to do what you want.  If you know 
the names of all the buttons you want to respond and they're unique, you 
could do something like the following:

First, establish a custom property stack to store the names of all your 
buttons:

set the uTrackButtonNames of this stack to "buttonName1, buttonName2, 
buttonName3" etc.

Then place the following in the stack script:

on mouseEnter
   if word 1 of the name of the target is not "button" then exit 
mouseEnter
   if short name of the target is in the uTrackButtonNames of this stack 
then \
       set the hilite of the target to true
end mouseEnter

on mouseLeave
   if word 1 of the name of the target is not "button" then exit 
mouseLeave
   if short name of the target is in the uTrackButtonNames of this stack 
then \
       set the hilite of the target to false
end mouseLeave

These handlers will only respond to button mouse events and even then 
only when the button names are part of the master name list stored in 
the custom property.  Also, if you want to update which buttons respond 
and which don't, simply update the master list.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director, Tactile Media