Storing Images for use by Custom Controls

[Bob Sneidar]

About saving images: I learned a long time ago, both with graphics and publications development, as well as software development, to have copies of resources in a subfolder of a main project folder. This has a couple advantages: First of all, graphics applications can often auto-resolve references if you do that. Second, in case you want to skin your app, you can keep sets of graphics in other folders, then do a simple folder rename kabuke dance and voila! You just reskinned your app! 

As far as the technique of grouping buttons with their image objects (I hide my image objects and put them behind the button they belong to) and then grouping all the control groups as one, this is a great method, and allows you to programmatically dynamically update the controls as needed. 

Finally, as I mentioned, naming the images and buttons so that knowing the button name makes the image name predictable eliminates the need to store everything in an array for access later, although I'm sure that is a workable solution as well. 

I have no problem having multiple copies of an image in my application, at least for MacOS and Windows apps. They shouldn't take up too much space if designed right, and the convenience of keeping the images with the buttons that need them ensures my forms will ALWAYS display correctly. 

Bob S


> On Jul 25, 2018, at 13:20 , Simon Knight via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
>>> The problem with this storage solution is that my custom control has
>>> components stored in different locations and they may well become
>>> separated sometime in the future.
>>> Initially, I searched the Livecode forum and found a thread where the
>>> prospect of better encapsulation of custom controls was discussed and Mark
>>> W. wrote that he was thinking  about it.  This was a few years ago when
>>> version 6 was current and I wondered if any features have been added to
>>> Livecode to enable fully encapsulated custom controls to be written.  I
>>> realise that one answer might be “write a widget” but I don’t really want
>>> to take time learning a new language and process in an attempt to recreate
>>> a control that I already have.