Window decorations and the effective rect issue

[Paul Dupuis]

Scott,

See the dictionary entry for "rectangle". There is a specific note that,
as of LC6, the effective rect of a stack includes its decorations and
window borders and is also settable. IMHO it was one of the best new
features of LC6+. What I did nto realize, but discovered this week was
that you can also get and set the effective topLeft, top, height, width,
left, bottom, etc. etc, of a stack and the value will factor in the
window decorations and borders. It is really handy!

set the height of stack "X" to tSomevalue -- based on its contents i.e.
it's inside dimensions
get the effective height of stack "X" -- will now tell you the resulting
outside dimensions after adjusting for the inside change!
OR Vice Versa
set the effective height of stack "X" to tSomevalue -- set the stack's
outside height
get the height of stack "X" -- will now tell you the resulting inside
height you have to work with!


On 9/9/2015 2:19 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
> Dumb comment/question on my part: I always thought the effective keyword
> was for reading only -- didn't think it was settable.  From the docs:
>
> The effective keyword is implemented internally as a property and appears
> in the propertyNames. However, it cannot be used as a prop in an
> expression, nor with the set com.
>
>
> (Guessing that last word was supposed to be "command").
>
> Is there something that says explicitly you can set the "effective"
> property of anything?
>
> Regards,
>
> Scott Rossi
> Creative Director
> Tactile Media, UX/UI Design
>
>
>
>
> On 9/9/15, 11:11 AM, "Paul Dupuis" <paul at researchware.com> wrote:
>
>> I have an application (main stack + many substacks + several external
>> stacks) that is ancient (originally built in HyperCard, ported to
>> Supercard, ported to Metacard, and on up to LiveCode 6.7.6.
>>
>> I was working on redoing some of the legacy screen layout code today -
>> taking advantage of 'the working screenrect' (working didn't exist way
>> back when) and 'the effective rect' of a stack (effective wasn't
>> available either)
>> A multi-window layout should now be as easy as get the working
>> screenrect and divide it up and set the effective rect of the stacks
>> (windows) to the divided up values. No more fudge factors for varying OS
>> window borders and title bars and such. Yea!
>>
>> However, I have run into a puzzler. Under Windows 8 (and Win 7) when I
>> set the effective rect of a stack to 0,0,x,y or set the effective
>> topLeft of a stack to 0,0, that stack is NOT taking into account the
>> wider window borders of Windows 7 and 8 and is positioning the stack
>> with part of its borders off screen - it is like the stack thinks it's
>> window borders were the thinner ones back under Windows 2000 or XP!
>>
>> This only occur with old stacks in the application - i.e. stacks
>> originally migrated from HyperCard > SuperCard > Metacard >Revolution.
>> If I create a new "Untitled 1" substack in the old legacy mainstack and
>> set it's effective topLeft to 0,0, it renders exactly as expected.
>>
>> I tried cloning (as in "clone stack <name>" one of the legacy stacks and
>> it also thinks it has thinner window borders that it really does.
>>
>> All these stacks have been saved from LC676 in the latest stack format
>> (the were previously in LC464). I created a new test mainstak and
>> substack in LC676 and the effective keyword works exactly as expected
>> with stacks. I also created an identical test stack under LC464 (the
>> oldest version I have) and the tried that under LC676 and it works
>> exactly as expected.
>>
>> I just appears to be really ancient stacks that have been
>> imported/migrated rather than any new stacks. Has anyone seen anything
>> like this?
>>
>> I'd rather not have to recreate each of these legacy stack by creating a
>> new "Untitled" stack and populating all the objects, scripts,
>> properties, etc, to fix this issue.
>>
>> Paul Dupuis
>> Researchware
>>
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