"Best practice" for creating a custom control

[Ken Ray]

> I'm looking for a kind of "best practice" for creating custom controls. For
> example, how to access the data of the custom control ? Do we have to use
> custom properties or a setProp or getProp handlers  or both ? Is it preferable
> to use a prefix for naming a command ? And for custom properties, do we have
> to use a set of properties ? With a "standard name" ? Etc.

You might want to take a look at the budding "standards" document that is in
development over at the revInterop user group:

 http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/revInterop/

There's a bunch of info there about naming conventions, etc.

As far as accessing the data is concerned, there isn't really a "best
practice" yet; getprop/setprop works well in *some* instances, but not in
others, as does actually using custom properties. For example, I tend to use
custom properties to store data relative to custom controls I've created,
and only use getProp/setProp when I want to trigger some kind of visual
feedback.

For example, I have a custom control which is a "prompt field" (it's a field
that shows a custom text string in gray; when the field gets the focus, the
text goes away so the user can type what they want, and when the field loses
the focus if there's no text in the field it shows the prompt again). To
specify what text should be shown as the prompt text, I set the
uSTSPromptText of the field to a value. If the field is currently showing a
text prompt, I'd like to change that to the value I'm setting for
uSTSPromptText, so I have a getProp handler that is triggered to make that
happen. 

Hope this helps,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/