Widget properties

[Tom Glod]

At the conference I will announce a plugin, which will have the code read
and write widget properties.
The code for the plugin will be on github.
I'm insanely busy at the moment, so I can't accelerate the release.
No magic, just hardcoded property names. :)

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 10:08 PM Monte Goulding via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

>
> > 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
>