widget properties

[Mark Wieder]

On 02/24/2018 03:08 PM, Ali Lloyd via use-livecode wrote:

> The VCS-related use case for an expanded properties property still exists
> though, as far as I can tell, although 'properties' is kind of a bad name
> for it. Actually I think it might be better to add 'export' syntax for
> classic controls. The nice thing about the export syntax is that you get
> exactly the distinct pieces of information required to reconstruct the
> widget (according to the widget author's implementation). It might actually
> be a completely distinct representation of the widget state than that
> provided by a list of properties and their values (although in practice,
> it's usually a subset of the properties).

I've always found the property lists in the engine clumsy and hard to 
maintain, in addition to them not being accessible outside the engine 
other than getting a subset through "the properties".

It's actually very easy to reconstruct objects with a property list that 
may contain non-settable entries. I do this with preference files all 
the time to stay out of trouble...

local tList -- contains the cr-separated properties as
-- tPropertyName<tab>tValue

local tObject -- the object whose properties we're setting
local tProperty, tValue
repeat for each line tLine in tList
   put item 1 of tLine into tProperty
   put item 2 of tLine into tValue
   try
     set the tProperty of tObject to tValue
   end try
end repeat

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com