Property Sheet for LC

[Neville Smythe]

Alex wrote

> The NavBar widget has a number of properties (itemNames, itemStyle, 
> hilitedItem, itemArray, ..) which are visible in the Object Inspector, 
> but not in 4WProps.

As discussed in a post a while ago, the problem is that requesting the properties of a widget object returns nothing [it is supposed to return enough property settings to be able to completely reproduce the object]. I guess Richard has assumed a list of basic properties and reported those, unless he has more information about widgets than I know. I do the same in nsScriptDatabase, the current version of which will report what I am calling the extrinsic properties of the object such as its rect, visibility etc.  It’s a slightly different list from Richards, but achieves much the same result. It just displays the values, it does not allow setting them as does Richard's excellent tool, because the objective of my app is as an archive not an IDE tool so it doesn’t alter the inspected stack.

However nsScriptDatabase will also expose the intrinsic properties of the widget reported by exporting the widget, such as the itemNames of the navBar widget etc. 

It turns out there are sometimes other internal properties of a widget which are only discoverable through the manifest for the widget, which is held by the IDE. An example is the scaledHeight of an SVG Icon widget. The next version of nsScriptDatabase will display the values of these properties, together with their default and expected values. Further, it it will also expose the public handlers for the widget with their input and output parameters. I expect to finish coding nsScriptDatabase 2.2 in the next few days.

Neville