one of the things I really like about the Squeak environment is the flaps. Being able to pull tools straight into your project really fits the environment I want to create. However, I couldn't work out how to get programmatic control of the objects. Thanks to the Squeak beginners list, I now know the answer.
There are three ways to solve the problem:
1. Halo the object and choose inspect. You can then send messages to the object via the bottom pane of the inspector window. That's good, but it wasn't quite what I wanted because it didn't let me use the workspace to build up some code (although I could have done the coding in the inspector window, that wasn't really how I wanted to work)
2. Assign self to a global variable. This occurred to me as I was doing something else. The basic problem was how to get a reference to the object into the workspace I was using. The object must exist in the current project, but I didn't know where to start looking for it. So, if I did something like this Temp1 := self. in the inspector, then the object had just been assigned to a global and I should be able to reference it from anywhere - works nicely. However, I then started worrying about my Smalltalk dictionary getting filled up with rubbish. I am a minimalist at heart, and don't like 'stuff'. After some digging around I found that remove: object won't work in a dictionary, but removeKey: #symbol does. So that's useful to know too.
3. Finally, the way suggested in the list was to turn on the feature in the workspace (click on the menu item in the window bar) which supports "textual reference to dropped morph" or something like that - don't have the image in front of me. This means that when you drop the morph on the workspace, the morph's 'name' e.g. textbox3012 is written into the workspace. This reference can then be used as the object handle. This is a great solution except for the fact that if the morph name has a space in it, then the reference won't work. I must find out a bit more about this at some time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Have you tried to drag a workspace into a flap? I have successfully dragged other morphs into a flap, but I can't seem to drag a workspace into it. It must be possible because there are workspaces inside of flaps.
Gosh, no, I hadn't even thought of trying that. You have piqued my curiosity.
I will have to dig into the drag and drop code to see if I can understand what happens when something is pulled onto a flap
Post a Comment