revEnterprise dp-5 / revMedia beta / revWeb beta

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Fri Oct 30 12:27:34 EDT 2009


Richard Miller wrote:
> I've discovered some other significant (for me) change to the runtime 
> environment in the past few days. A traditional cascading menu (built 
> with the menu builder).... which worked fine yesterday during runtime... 
> no longer works today. The menu (which I dragged to the center of the 
> stack so it functions as a button with cascading selections), depresses 
> OK. The list of hierarchical selections show up OK. But any attempt to 
> actually make a selection fails.

At last I've found someone else who uses cascade menus!

Cascade menus were originally added as part of the old stack-based menu 
system, which few people use anymore now that we can use the textual 
contents of menu button as menu items without having to build a stack 
for those.

But cascade menus remain very useful for another purpose, as flyout 
menus.  Adobe and many others place such menus at the upper-right of 
their palettes, and they're useful in other contexts as well.

But unfortunately, the behavior of cascade menus differs from others in 
that most menus let you click and release and the menu stays up until 
you either select one of its items or click away from it, but cascade 
menus only appear as long as the mouse is down.

Also, while most menu styles render their menus using OS routines, 
cascade menus draw using the built-in emulated appearances, giving them 
a non-standard look that compounds the non-standard behavior.

There are workarounds for this, but they're not straightforward to 
implement and would certainly throw off the newcomer.

Jacque has noted this in the RQCC, and I've amended her request with 
additional notes:
<http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=1338>

Richard, what do you use cascade menus for?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv



More information about the use-livecode mailing list