Widget properties

[Monte Goulding]

> On 7 Apr 2022, at 11:25 am, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Can you help me understand how it's better than "the properties", and why this superior method isn't used for engine controls?
> 

Because the array created by export and used by import contains the state of the widget as is saved when saving the stack. The content may or may not be the same as the property names exposed to user scripts but a widget created with that state should be the same as if it were saved in the stack and the stack re-opened.

> 
> > - 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
> 
> That seems to answer the first question, though while the metadata about types and options is useful for some things, it would still be useful to get just the name-value pairs as "the properties" does.
> 
> That the company has such a narrowly specific view of the applicability of "the properties" is indeed helpful. Thank you for chiming in.

I’m not the company. Mark may spend a lot more time pondering the utility of `the properties` than I do and indeed may have a different opinion. Indeed my opinion was much closer to yours is now when I sent in a PR for LC 6.1 all those years ago ;-)

> Let me simplify the question:
> 
> How hard would it be for the team to map the existing means of extracting widget properties to "the properties”?

I don’t think it would be particularly tricky to iterate the exported property definitions to come up with a list of property names then turn that into a key/value array. Whether it would provide the utility you are looking for is a separate question.

Cheers

Monte