utterbac@husc8.HARVARD.EDU (Margot Utterback) (10/13/89)
This has probably already been answered here, but I need a "find next" button. I have a corporate directory which uses "find" to find the needed entry. Since there may be several people with the same name I would like to be able to have the user press a button to find the next occurence. I know at this point the user can press return and find the next entry, put this is not obvious. I tried "type return" but I just find the same occurence again! This problem is noted in Danny Goodman's book, but there is no solution listed there. Margot
SAS102@PSUVM.BITNET (Steven A. Schrader) (10/13/89)
In article <2832@husc6.harvard.edu>, utterbac@husc8.HARVARD.EDU (Margot Utterback) says: > >This has probably already been answered here, but I need a "find next" button. >I have a corporate directory which uses "find" to find the needed entry. >Since there may be several people with the same name I would like to be able >to have the user press a button to find the next occurence. I know at this >point the user can press return and find the next entry, put this is not >obvious. I tried "type return" but I just find the same occurence again! >This problem is noted in Danny Goodman's book, but there is no solution listed >there. > >Margot Try going to the next card and searching again. This was the simplest solution I came up with. Since you are not on the same card it will find the next occu rance ... ------- Steven A. Schrader (SAS102@Psuvm SAS@Psuarch) _________________________________________________________________________ 227C Computer Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pa. 16802 Phone : (814) 865 - 2160 343 Strouse Ave. State College, Pa. 16803 (814) 237 - 8196
tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (10/16/89)
In article <2832@husc6.harvard.edu> utterbac@husc8.UUCP (Margot Utterback) writes: >This has probably already been answered here, but I need a "find next" button. >I have a corporate directory which uses "find" to find the needed entry. >Since there may be several people with the same name I would like to be able >to have the user press a button to find the next occurence. I know at this >point the user can press return and find the next entry, put this is not >obvious. I tried "type return" but I just find the same occurence again! >This problem is noted in Danny Goodman's book, but there is no solution listed >there. Please be sure to let us know if you find a solution, other than Steven Schrader's idea of going to the next card and searching again. (This is probably adequate for your purposes, but not for mine; I'm searching for text, not cards. If it appears twice on a card, I want to see both, one after the other.) In general, the whole find mechanism is underdocumented and underdeveloped; I've had a devil of a time getting any sort of "Find next" functionality into my current stack project. It seems that as soon as you do anything other than hit the return key after finding, including pressing a menu equivalent key or a button, HyperCard immediately loses the current "find selection", so you are going to be searching from the start of the card again and finding the same thing again. And of course, if you do just hit return, then you've lost a measure of control over finding; if you were searching in a particular field, then too bad; return will find the next one in any field. Also, there's no control over which background you are searching in any case, and we are all presumably aware of the problems with searching for multi-word phrases. And of course, you can't bypass it and use the "contains" mechanism, because there's no way to select something after you've found the offset and length of its substring. Did I mention how stupid the hidden field handling is? I've found the find mechanism to be the single most frustrating thing about HyperCard. Not only will it just not work as you would like (if you think "find next" is hard, try doing a "replace" sometime), but there is precious little documentation explaining just how it does work. This constantly leaves me with the feeling that they must have put in a way to do what I want, but they didn't bother to tell us peons how to do it. It seems they're perfectly happy to make naive users use the message box. I'm not. -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." -- John Stuart Mill, UTILITARIANISM (1863)
Barry.Chern@f200.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Barry Chern) (10/18/89)
Tim Maroney writes: >Please be sure to let us know if you find a solution, other than Steven >Schrader's idea of going to the next card and searching again. (This >is probably adequate for your purposes, but not for mine; I'm searching >for text, not cards. If it appears twice on a card, I want to see >both, one after the other.) Well, I thought there must be an easy way to do this. I was wrong. Even if you select after the first find, it still goes back and finds it again. But I did come up with a work-around. If somebody else already had a cleaner way to do this, I'd like to be reminded of it. My version basically keeps track of how many finds you've done on the card. If you already found one instance, it does two finds, if you've found 2, it finds 3 times, etc. You'll notice that my "find" script has a line that says Find "D". this was just my test stuff, you'll have to get your find info in there somehow. You'll probably also want to add a lockscreen, so you don't see all those sequential finds taking place. Here's the scripts. Find button: (if you weren't using a button for your find, you don't need the globals. Just get the stuff to find into findWhat and put 2 into findNo at the beginning of the Find Next script.) on mouseUp global findWhat global foundlast global findNo put 1 into findNo put "d" into findWhat find findWhat put the foundchunk into foundlast add 1 to findNo end mouseUp Find Next button: on mouseUp global foundlast global findwhat global findNo put the id of this cd into thisCd select after foundlast repeat for findNo find findwhat end repeat put the foundchunk into foundlast if the id of this cd = thisCd then add 1 to findNo else put 2 into findNo end if end mouseUp Hope everyone tests this out and gets back to me with bugs and improvements. Barry. ** Origin : Aurora Borealis BBS - 614-471-6209 - 9600 HST - 1:226/200 ** -- Barry Chern via cmhGate - Net 226 fido<=>uucp gateway Col, OH UUCP: ...!osu-cis!n8emr!cmhgate!200!Barry.Chern INET: Barry.Chern@f200.n226.z1.FIDONET.ORG
tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (10/21/89)
Barry Chern's idea of refinding successive times and keeping track of
how many makes sense -- I also received an e-mail message discussing a
variant on this technique. However, given the new features added to
HyperTalk in 1.2.1, and documented in the Release Notes stack that came
with it, it can be even easier. After any find, simply select the
found text. The next find command will start looking after the
selection. This is how most text editors on the Mac work, and it
presents an intuitively obvious interface. The command to do so is
just "select the findChunk".
Thanks to those on the net who told me to read the Release Notes stack,
which I had only been dimly aware existed, and which I assumed was
simply documentation of bug fixes. In fact, it is an indispensable
addition to the on-line documentation. I agree with the person who
wrote me and said that it was awfully slack that they hadn't updated
the on-line manual with the new features. It would have saved me days
of head-scratching about the Find command if I'd known.
--
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com
"Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear
another: he has written all the old falshoods.
And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, &
conversed not with Devils who all hate religion..."
- Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (10/23/89)
In article <8764@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >After any find, simply select the >found text. The next find command will start looking after the >selection. This is how most text editors on the Mac work, and it >presents an intuitively obvious interface. The command to do so is >just "select the findChunk". No, Tim, you idiot. You should have tried it before making this suggestion. First, there's a display bug. If you find successfully and then "select the findChunk", then the text appears selected, but as soon as the user does anything, the findChunk goes away, leading to the text becoming unselected in appearance, even though it is still the selection. Selecting a range and finding it have different rectangles. Try and see what I mean -- finding a phrase in a title field gives a rectangle which stops at the last letter of the title; selecting the findChunk at this point selects all the way to the end of the line on which the last word appears; so after the findChunk vanishes, you're left with a spurious black rectangle starting right after the last letter and going to the end of the line. Second, the find command does *not* start after the current selection. It starts at the end of the findChunk or at the beginning of the current card (if there is no findChunk). So this technique leads to display anomalies and to finding the same string over and over again. What a pain. It looks like we're stuck with counting the "find index" of each string in the card, then repeating the search that many times plus one on "find next". This is so nasty a hack that I believe it qualifies as a bug in HyperCard. There should be some global property specifying a chunk expression for the next search to start at. There isn't one in HC 1.2.1; does anyone know if this has been added in a later version? -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "There's a real world out there, with real people. Go out and play there for a while and give the Usenet sandbox a rest. It will lower your stress levels and make the world a happier place for us all." -- Gene Spafford
tsung@aerospace.aero.org (Fu-Sheng Tsung) (10/31/89)
One way to do "find next" in a field is to write your own "find"
routine in the script. Say you found the string on line N the first
time, and that the field has M lines. "Find next" would search for
the string beginning at line N+1 of the field; that is, you can
global N, M
get offset(searchString,line N+1 to M of field "Text")
if it <> 0 then -- string found
-- update scrolling
select char it to length(searchString) + it -1 of\
line N to M of field "Text"
-- update N (+ the number of lines in char 1 to it of ...)
else
-- not found, or no more occurances
The main trick here is that you can actually specify a subfield ("line
N to M of field") in place of a field specification. This is more
work than Barry's "index find" method, e.g. you need to update the
scrolling yourself, but the operation can look very nice (and
consistent with "Find") to the user.
Fu-Sheng Tsung