How do I scan all the objects on a card?

[Jeanne A. E. DeVoto]

At 9:12 AM -0800 2/12/03, Graham Samuel wrote:
>If you have a card with a lot of objects on it (well, more than one
>will do), and you look at the properties of any object via the
>Development Environment, you will see a set of four buttons for
>changing the object's layer - 'send to back', 'move backward', 'move
>forward' and 'send to front'. My mental model of the card was that
>the layers could be shared, so that one imagines 'sent to back'
>objects like the backdrop in a theatre, and foreground objects like
>props or actors, some sets of whom might be exactly the same distance
>from the front of the stage.

Aha. Actually, it works more like a draw program (like the old MacDraw, or
the draw module in AppleWorks): each object is on its own layer, and "send
to back" and "bring to front" just puts an object on the rearmost or
frontmost layer.

I agree this needs to be explained better.


>out all the consequences (for example, a group will contain objects
>which by definition will all be on separate layers - what happens
>when I send the whole group to the back?).

The whole group moves together through the layers, so if you have a group
with a button in front of a field (for example) and send the group to the
back, the field will be the rearmost object, with the button on top, and
then the other objects on the card.

It's similar in some ways to the way you drag a group - it moves as a
single object horizontally and vertically, as well as in the Z (depth) axis.


>I'm sorry that people like me keep banging on about misconceptions
>we've somehow picked up on the way and then seem to be blaming them
>on the documentation. I do feel the docs are well done and therefore
>don't want to appear negative. Maybe it helps to see that different
>people approach issues from a different angle sometimes.

Absolutely. This sort of discussion is very useful to me.

--
Jeanne A. E. DeVoto ~ jeanne at runrev.com
Runtime Revolution Limited - The Solution for Software Development
http://www.runrev.com/