Pseudo Drag and Drop question

[Alex Tweedly]

Jerry Balzano wrote:

>OK, on further review ...
>
>The maneuver suggested by David Epstein, although it seemed promising at
>first, won't work.  The only way the mouseEnter message gets triggered by
>the "receiving" object is (a) if the mouse button is up, and (b) if the
>moving control is in a layer *beneath* the receiver (else the receiver
>doesn't "see" the cursor).  The documentation on "mouseEnter" verifies all
>this.  Since (b) one would generally want to "set the layer to top" for
>any "dragged" control, and (a) one would generally have the mouse button
>down in such situations, we are double-damned.
>
>So I am back to thinking that in order to have Rev do what I want, i.e.
>have any  potential drop locations hilight as soon as the dragged object
>(or the pointer) overlaps (enters) its rectangle, I believe I need to (p)
>manage a list of potential target-controls and (q) iterate over it until I
>find one with the mouseLoc (or some such) enters the rect of it.
>
>I mainly want to know, am I right about this, that there is no easier or
>better way?
>  
>
I don't know (for sure) that there isn't an easier way - but it sounds 
like you've done a diligent search and not found one yet, so it may be 
time to go ahead with this way.

Earlier, you said:

> I foresee this "solution" scaling badly as the number of controls on 
> the card increases.

You could help the scaling performance by

> to (p)
>manage a list of potential target-controls and (q) iterate over it until I
>find one with the mouseLoc (or some such) enters the rect of it.
>
Rather than a list of controls, and checking against the rect of it, I'd 
keep a list of rectangles, as in
  x1, y1, x2, y2, "long name of the control"

Then a check that said

on mouseMove newx, newy
   if abs(newx-gLastX) < 10 and abs(newy-gLastY) < 10 then return
   repeat for each line L in gControlList
      if item 1 of L  < newx and newx < item 3 of L  and .... etc.
   end repeat
end mouseMove

would be pretty quick. Only checking when the delta is big enough is a 
help - and running through a list like this would be quick.
In the unlikely case you do run into performance issues (because you had 
hundreds or thousands of such controls), you could use some of the fancy 
geometric sorting techniques to allow you to only check against 
relatively few of them

-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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