dewi@druca.UUCP (Maker of Ritual Grimaces) (06/10/86)
Here's a problem that has been causing me to bang my head against a wall for a while. I'm hoping that somebody out there has some inspiration to donate... Imagine a requester that pops up, with a couple of lines of informational text, and a button to make it go away again. Normally, this one's easy - you can use AutoRequest. But this time, there's a nasty wrinkle - the application is an UNIX one that I'm porting to the Amiga - it's curses based and requires 25 lines. Faking the curses was easy enough, but to get the necessary number of lines I had to opt for one of those "invisible" menu bars that only appear when you click the menu select mouse button. A menu interface was grafted onto the application. AutoRequest (and BuildSysRequest, as far as I can see) automatically adds window depth-arrangement gadgets to the requester. At least, I can't see any way to prevent this. So, what happens when you send this requester to the back? Your program's hung inside AutoRequest waiting for the button to be clicked --- but you can't get at the button to click it! Control-Amiga-Amiga time. This problem also turned up in the "About PDTERM" menu selection of PDTERM, by the way. I really don't want to resort to setting up a new window for this case -- I started hacking up "Fun With Gadgets" to suit -- but it looked like I needed large amounts of code and copious coordinate declarations to make it work. Has anyone had any thoughts about holding window and requester descriptors in IFF-style files, sort of like the Macintosh resource concept? Having to declare arrays of coordinates for buttons and recompiling until it looks OK can be a real pain in the butt. I'd see this as being complementary with John Draper's code-generating gadget/requester editor project. Cheers, Dewi Williams -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dewi Williams. uucp: ..!ihnp4!druca!dewi phone: (303) 538 4884