Widget properties

[Monte Goulding]

> On 7 Apr 2022, at 9:39 am, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> Monte Goulding wrote:
> 
> > ...there has never been any intention of supporting the properties
> > for widgets as far as I’m aware...
> 
> If the company wants widgets to be seen as first-class citizens, a little more conformity with existing object syntax would go a long way to making that happen.
> 
> It's possible for the engine to derive a set of widget properties. If it's not also possible to map that into how "the properties" works that would be very enlightening.
> 
> 
> FWIW I've had requests to update my 4W Property Sheet tool to special-case for widgets. I tell people I'll take widgets seriously when the company does, and if they do I won't need to update my tool because the existing call to "the properties" that works for everything else will work for widgets.
> 
> Maybe I've been overestimating the importance of widgets to LC Ltd. Guidance welcome.

It seems a stretch to imply the lack of support for a property that has little to no use case outside the IDE means the company doesn’t take widgets seriously but I’m not going to argue with you about that. I will say there’s two main use cases for `the properties` and neither of them it serves very well:

- Getting the properties of an object to apply to recreate the object elsewhere. export widget does a much better job of this and was designed specifically for that use case. In some variants of this use case the copy command is much simpler to use here too.
- Introspecting what properties an object has in order to create an editor without maintaining your own lists of properties. It has never been good at this. It doesn’t tell you anything about acceptable values for those properties, it doesn’t tell you the importance of the property, it doesn’t tell you about alternative object properties that may be more useful to edit (text, styledText, htmlText, rtfText etc) or whether it’s potentially risky to present a UI that can edit it. Really this use case is served best by a well documented library that covers all objects. Currently you would need to dig the details out of the IDE scripts

Cheers

Monte