Another Sly Laboratories innovation

Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com
Fri Dec 30 18:07:00 EST 2011


Hi all. 

I think I just came up with a way to get information from another stack that otherwise would be invisible to the stack I am working on. In this case I wanted a property of a card field on a card in a stack that was not the one I was working with. Further, I wanted to be able to change the card field, the card and even the stack on the fly without having to make those stacks aware of the controlling stack. 

I knew the short name of the field. I needed the long ID of that field. The trouble is, the object belonged to a group that I did NOT know. Also, the global had not been declared in the target stack, and since I wanted this stack to work with any stack I used it on, I didn't want to have to make every one of those stacks aware of the global to use it. 

I did this in a menu of card fields on the target card:

global gWhichField, gWhichCard, gWhichStack
--> all handlers

on menuPick pChosen
    put pChosen into theField
    send "global gWhichField;put the long id of " & theField & " of " & gWhichCard & " into gWhichField" to gWhichStack
end menuPick

This updated the global gWhichField in the current stack without having to know the ID of the group it belonged to. Notice in the send command I actually sent two commands, the global declaration and the actual command. The dictionary does not mention that you can do this. I am not sure anyone ever thought of trying. I don't think it will work with dispatch, as the key to this working is that send temporarily makes the target stack the defaultStack. I suppose you could apply this same technique of sending multiple commands to solve some other sticky problems. 

It is quite possible that I drank too much coffee and am solving the problem some long, convoluted and completely unnecessary way, so feel free to chide me if I have. 

Bob





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