about backgroundbehaviour and message passing

[Rodney Tamblyn]

Setting the backgroundbehaviour of a group to true causes it to be 
added to the message passing hierarchy after the card. As a result it 
receives all the card events such as opencard, preopencard, closecard 
etc.  The events opengroup and closegroup (as well as openbackground & 
closebackground which are included for Hypercard compatability) are 
only sent to groups who backgroundbehaviour is set to true.  I think 
that opengroup and closegoup should be sent to all groups.

In the situation where you want groups that only respond to events 
generated by controls that are amongst it's children, you must manually 
send events such as opencard, opengroup etc if you need them.  
Therefore I've found it best to set backgroundbehaviour to false, and 
have a handlers (at stack or library level) which respond to opencard, 
closecard, preopencard etc, gets the groups of the card, and sends it 
the desired event.

To ensure groups receive initiator messages (such as opencard, 
preopencard) while still preventing them from receiving events 
originated by objects which are not their children do the following:

   Place a handler on preclosecard which inspects the groups on the card 
and determines which should receive events (eg by checking name or a 
custom property).  For those that need to receive events, set the 
backgroundbehaviour to true.  Now the opencard message will propagate 
up through the card, through the groups (which now have 
backgroundbehaviour enabled), and when it reaches the stack level, the 
reverse handler will set the backgroundbehaviour to false - ensuring 
the group only receives events generated by it's children and not other 
objects on the card.

In stack script, all groups have now received opencard, check which 
shouldn't have backgroundbehaviour

In stack script:

groups won't receive this, so send it to them
on preclosecard
#use whatever mechanism you need to work out which grps need this done
   repeat for each line x in the customPropertySets of the target #ie 
the card
     if there is a group x then set the backgroundbehaviour of group x 
to false
#could also send them a preclose msg here, probably best not to send 
them preclosecard, use grppreclose or #something else
   end repeat	
end preclosecard

on opencard
  set the backgroundbehaviour of me to false #removes grp from message 
heirarchy
  pass opencard
end opencard

One side effect is that when you create new cards the groups will be 
placed on them, which may well be what you want anyway - but you need 
to bear this in mind.

Your comments on the above solution & whether there is a better way to 
achieve what I want would be of interest.

Rodney

--
Rodney Tamblyn
44 Melville Street
Dunedin
New Zealand
+64 3 4778606
http://rodney.weblogs.com/