Palette redraw problem

[J. Landman Gay]

On 5/21/04 11:25 AM, Scott Rossi wrote:

> You've thrown down the gauntlet -- this sounds like a good challenge.
> 
> Can you explain why the palette needs to disappear when not top most?

Sure. The palette is a tool palette. Another substack is an object 
editing area where the user can design stuff; mostly custom field 
objects, line graphics, and text entry -- sort of a page layout thing. 
The palette is only appropriate to that particular one-card editing 
substack, and in fact, I don't want the tools available elsewhere lest 
they start creating or removing objects in the cards of the mainstack 
(and I don't want to write all the scripts that would prevent that.) The 
editing stack and the palette are both substacks of the main stack.

So we have:

        myMainStack
         |      |
    myTools   myEditingStack

When the editing substack opens, it needs to always have its tool 
palette available. When it closes, the tool palette is closed. This 
works, implemented with opencard and closecard handlers. If, however, 
the user clicks back over to the mainstack, the tools should also go 
away. This doesn't work consistently. If it did, everything is solved.

Second solution might be: Don't allow the user to suspend the editing 
stack at all. If they can't suspend the editing stack, then the 
suspend/resume problems don't exist. However, I can't make the editing 
stack modal (or palette) because it won't allow object editing if it is. 
I could leave it as modeless or toplevel, and try to script blockages so 
that the user can't click on the main stack (which I'm not sure is 
completely possible either,) except that Windows users could still bring 
the mainstack forward via the taskbar.

Third possible solution: Make the editing stack into another card of the 
mainstack. This would probably work, except that I don't think it looks 
professional to have the main stack "disappear" during editing, which is 
how it would look visually. I'd rather have a separate editing window.

I seem to have hit an impasse. If you want to undertake this challenge, 
then I will enthusiastically root for you to win. :)

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com