Problem! Inaccessible substack

[Jerry Balzano]

Thanks to Richard, Chipp, and Alex for their responses to my plea for  
assistance.

It turned out that Richard's suggested script (below) fixed the problem  
just fine — what a life saver!  The feeling was like having a set of  
keys sitting on the floor inside a jail cell (behind the bars), and all  
you have is a long stick that you can use to poke through the bars and  
try to manipulate and move the stuff on the other side until you can  
get at it with your hands.

It's true also what Richard said about the "Quit" command, btw, that it  
ceased to work as long as I had a stack open with a numerically-named  
substack attached to it, and I had to force-quit Revolution until the  
problem was fixed.  So I agree heartily that unless & until substacks  
with numerical names can be handled properly, there should probably be  
some built-in manner of preventing such a name from being attached to a  
substack.

What was weird about this happening in the first place was how  
commandKeys weren't always working properly if it just so happened that  
some field of the property-inspector palette had the focus.  The key  
pressed along with the commandKey ended up getting "echoed" in the  
field, something I didn't realize the dire implications of until it was  
too late.  ("Too late" being the case once I'd closed the (sub)stack  
window ... although things were behaving strangely before that, if I  
recall.)

Anyway, thanks again — this has been very educational (Silver Lining  
Dept), if somewhat harrowing.

- Jerry

On Feb 4, 2005, at 8:24 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Chipp Walters wrote:
>> Also, I'd consider uninstalling Devolution if you can and then try  
>> again. Richard's an incredible programmer (thorough and very picky),  
>> and he programmed all of Devolution inside the Metacard IDE, not the  
>> Revolution IDE. He doesn't spend as much time in the Rev IDE as MC,  
>> so I would assume Devolution probably hasn't logged as many hours  
>> inside Rev as MC either. If, in fact there is an obscure conflict, I  
>> expect it would be Revolution's IDE doing something *not expected*  
>> rather than Richard's code having a problem.
>
> That's very kind, but not always true. ;)
>
>> But, as a last resort, removing all plugins is always a good idea  
>> (including mine as well).
>
> Ordinarily that would be optimal:  pull plugins to cut down the  
> potential solution space, putting them back in batches if the problem  
> went away with them removed (just as with extensions conflicts in Mac  
> Classic).
>
> But if I read his post correctly, he has a stack named "33" -- most  
> everyone's tools choke on stacks named with only numerals, since  
> attempting to address them by shot name is also a valid reference by  
> number, but likely to a different stack.
>
> His post mentions that the Rev IDE doesn't even show it at all.  So  
> even without potentially wonky plugins (and it's true I spend  
> relatively little time in the Rev IDE) the situation cannot improve.
>
> Try it:  name a substack "33" and play around with the IDE.  Strange  
> things happen.  Here I see blank entries in the Exec Err dialog pop up  
> a lot, esp. when I select File->Quit.
>
> This has come up here before, in Dec. '03:  
> <http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2003-December/ 
> 027697.html>.
>
> Here's the repair script from that post:
>
> on mouseup
>    put "MyMainStackName" into tMainStack  --< your main stack name
>    get the substacks of stack tMainStack
>    repeat with i = 1 to the number of lines of it
>       if the short name of stack i of stack tMainStack is a number then
>          set the name of stack i of stack tMainStack to (i&"xxxx")
>       end if
>    end repeat
> end mouseup