Better than tables, better than delimited lines?

[Thomas McGrath III]

Richard,

My first successful project doing the 3 criteria evaluation was in 
SuperCard over seven years ago. Once I figured out 'a method' for the 
eval part then I needed to store temporary lists of the evaluated lines 
and do a lot of reseting of button/images based on the new lists. 
Clicking one button would start the eval based upon what button it was 
and the system would need to see that button as mykey1 in slot item 1 
across multiple lines, then a second button click would only search 
those found lines and produce a list based on those two criteria and 
then a third button would do the same to produce a final list matching 
all three in a 'live' sort of way as the user was pressing buttons. 
Then if the user decided they wanted to back out of a sequence to the 
second or first button I would keep the temp lists around for that. Oh 
yeah and each button has three states (available to press, unavailable 
to press, and a while being pressed state- mouseDown) which are driven 
by the info in the database. The old system used 128 buttons but this 
new one is only using 18 buttons so it will be a lot less cumbersome to 
deal with.

I knew I could do this, but in SC it became so cumbersome and that 
memory is one part that kept me from attempting it again in Rev for so 
long. But I am ready now since I have a need to do it.  I think the 
memory of taking this on again is what drove me to letting our Director 
guy handle it in the first place. I will post some samples once I start 
that part. The scripts will be all new using Rev's more powerful 
features and the biggest part will be not falling into my old thinking 
which was based on the 'limitations' in SC. Therefore, I am not going 
back and reading 'any' of my old scripts but rather forcing myself to 
start fresh and find new better ways.

So far, I have been testing my button states  which use a mask with a 
blendlevel and visible states as a way of being visually available and 
then the eval part is next.

Thanks

Tom

On Apr 22, 2005, at 3:04 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> I would be interested in seeing the original poster's script for 
> querying items in a delimited list.  Reported as cumbersome, I'm 
> confident some of the folks here could optimize it for very satisfying 
> performance.
>
> I've been doing some testing with some complicated queries of 
> delimited lists and have been able to do a three-criteria evaluation 
> ("if item 1 contains x and item 3 contains y and item 6 is not in x") 
> of each line in a list of 40,000 lines in under two seconds on a 
> modest 1GHz machine.
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation

Thomas J. McGrath III
SCS
1000 Killarney Dr.
Pittsburgh, PA 15234
412-885-8541