Changing the Layer/Resizing Controls

Ken Ray kray at sonsothunder.com
Tue Dec 6 12:26:48 EST 2005


On 12/6/05 9:16 AM, "David Burgun" <dburgun at dsl.pipex.com> wrote:


> Sorry, I don't understand this, what if I have a control in a another
> group that is lower than the group I want to move the control to?
> 
> In the previous version of RunRev, you could set
> relayerGroupedControls to true, selected the control and then move it
> via the layer arrows in the property inspector, why can't I do this
> now? It seems a *lot* easier than the other methods.

I'm sure it's an IDE bug, David... one thing you could do is select the
object and use the message box and type in the command:

  set the layer of the selObj to <whateverNumberYouWant>

Assuming that this "manual" approach works properly, I'd check Bugzilla to
see if this bug has been logged already, and if not, log it as a bug.

> I have a group that with some text  locatated at the top, this needs
> to be X Pixels down from the Top Border of the group. To do this I
> must set the "lockLoc" property of the group, otherwise the top of
> the group moves down so that the gap is now less than X.
> 
> At the bottom of the Group I have a Rectangle, which is Y pixels in
> height and I want to increase the height to Z pixels. If I increase
> the height, the bottom gets truncated to the bottom of the group,
> unless I set lockLoc to false, and, if I do that, then the top moves!
> Arrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh!
> 
> Is there a way of doing this or is it impossible and I'm just wasting my time?

It's not impossible, it's just frustrating. Here's what I do... I work with
the internal controls in a group until I get them exactly the way I want
them (with the lockLoc of the group 'false'), and then I adjust the group
itself to show the spaces around the objects the way I want them, and then I
lock the group into place by setting the lockLoc to 'true'. If I then need
to adjust where the group is on the card, I'll use the arrow keys to nudge
it into place.

One other thing to look at is the 'margins' property of the group.
Personally the default margins for groups (4 pixels) is too small for me,
and gets too close to the controls inside the group. So I almost always set
the margin of the group to 8 pixels because it feels right to me. To change
the margins for the group, go to the Text Formatting menu choice in the
Properties palette. If you can get away with just changing the margins and
not having to set the lockLoc of the group, you can save a lot of headaches.

> I have a Stack that needs some modifications. Basically there were 4
> groups originally and now this needs to be comdensed into 3 groups
> which meants controls being moved into the other groups which means
> resizing and relocating the groups and controls. It just seems so
> hard to do this simple task, and, for some reason (apart from the
> Layer Arrows not working), it seemed a lot easier in the previous
> version of RunRev.

Any chance you can ungroup, reselect and regroup the objects in their proper
groups instead of trying to relayer them from one group to another?

Just my 2 cents,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com




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