New User Doc Whine & What?

[Mike Arnold]

New user of RR Studio 2.8.1 Build 472 on Mac OS/X 10.4.11 PPC G4.

I have put together the beginnings of an application that uses mySQL, 
with a mainstack and (so far) 3 substacks.  Things are going slow, 
but making progress.  Took a while to figure out why my mainstack's 
openstack & closestack scripts got control when I opened/closed a 
substack ... almost seems like a bug, but I am getting the hang of 
it, I think. (added null message handlers to substacks and all was 
well)  Still trying to figure out what goes in openCard vs openStack 
... normal learning curve.  I've got menus and custom properties, 
hiding/showing controls, etc.

Then I decided to add a checkbox button.  Spent an inordinate amount 
of time trying to figure out how to retrieve the check/not-checked 
status.  Very frustrating.  No where could I find it documented.
The are both containers ... but 'field "myField"' returns the 
contents of a field, though 'button "myButton"' does not return the 
checked status.  I assigned a value of false to the button, and it 
retained it forever (so a check box _is_ a container, just not 
related to the check box status).  I finally looked at an example 
that had a check box to find the hilite property (well keyword, the 
hilite property in the dictionary says it is used to set the value, 
not test it).  Who would have thought ...

A BNF of the language would be most helpful, does one exist?  Or 
really any complete language reference.

Is there a message reference?  In the video about how to find 
information, it shows (what seems to be) pre-2.8.1 documentation, and 
just from the short clip, it looks like this documentation could help 
somewhat (there was a short clip of a message reference too).  After 
my open/closeStack default message passing incident,  I feel a sudden 
need to know every message.

And just now, my variable watch window decided to not show most 
variables.  Instead, it shows the variable names in the values. 
Before the variable is set and right after, doesn't matter, just the 
variable name (vpharmacy | vpharmacy).  The script continues to work 
and the message box displays the correct values, but the variable 
watch window is no longer functional. (it worked before)

thanks in advance and appologies for the whine,
Mike.