New locs for old dialogs

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Fri May 2 Richard Gaskin wrote:

 (snip)


> The difficulty of modifying Ask and Answer dialogs is the frequency of
> updates.  Both MC and Rev are under constant development, so making
> modfications to their dialogs gets old after the first dozen times. :)
> ...
> > It should be easy to construct your own dialogs once you are familiar
> > with the use of the dialogdata property and custom properties for the
> > exchange of data between a mainstack and a modal dialog,
>
> Agreed, and often the very best option.  But now and then the Ask and Answer
> are so convenient it's hard to resist the temptation to use them also.
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation
>  Developer of WebMerge 2.2: Publish any database on any site
>
Richard,

Jim Hurley has already pointed out that the frontscript solution does
not work on the Mac platform for Revolution.

I mostly agree with your comments, namely that of course the in-build
answer and ask dialogs are convenient, although we should take the
trouble to construct our own dialogs if necessary.

The frequence of updates does not pose a difficulty - as I see it -
because it takes only a few seconds to add that script line I proposed
for setting a "NewLoc" custom property. And you can store this slightly
modified answer dialog separately and add it as a substack to your
stacks when needed, as substacks apparently take precedence even in an
environment that has an unmodified answer dialog (as a substack of the
homestack).--

I build 2 sample stacks "NewLocAnswer-Metacard.mc" and
"NewLocAnswer-Revolution.rev" that demonstrate this approach.

You can set the loc of the dialog to topleft, topright or the default
positions that are different on Windows and MacOS (i.e. for Revolution
only). No "flashing" happens. The button scripts are displayed when you
touch the buttons and you can have a look at the Rev and Metacard
scripts of their modified answer dialogs.

As I already mentioned, you need not modify the answer dialogs of your
Metacard/Revolution environment to run the stacks, because the modified
substacks take precedence.

As before, you can download the commented sample stacks from our
FTP-server in folder

"ftp://ftp.hrz.uni-kassel.de/pub/uni-kassel/Zentraler.Medienbereich/Sanke/Metacard/MetacardPractice/".

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke