glen@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Glen Rosendale) (03/07/89)
I'm hoping that somebody can help me, and that I'm also not raising a question that's already been hashed to death (probably a dead certainty anyway). I'm part of a team that's creating tutorial courseware for an introductory EE course at UC Berkeley, using Hypercard on an SE. We want to make our efforts available to the students as soon as we can, but need to be careful about the security of the Mac. Specifically, we want to make the tutorial stack the startup file, and prevent users from getting out of Hypercard to the finder without a password (so that the team members can get to the other programs on disk). Is there an existing stack/xcmd/whatever that will accomplish this end? Can anybody gently rub my nose in the obvious solution that I'm patently disregarding? Replies via email, please--I will post a summary if people wish. Any and all help will be appreciated. Glen Rosendale (glen@cory.berkely.edu) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Glen Rosendale | UC Berkeley | glen@cory.berkeley.edu | | ++++++++++++++ | =========== | ---------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jdevoto@Apple.COM (Jeanne A. E. DeVoto) (03/08/89)
In article <10738@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> glen@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Glen Rosendale) writes:
[ is making a tutorial system in HyperCard, and wants to 1) launch directly
into the tutorial, and 2) prevent users from quitting to the Finder unless
they have the correct password.]
(I am posting this because it illustrates a general technique others may
find useful.)
When the user chooses a menu item, HyperCard sends a "doMenu" message to
the current card. The message's parameter consists of the text of the menu
item.
Like many HyperCard messages, doMenu can be intercepted by a script before
it is executed by HyperCard. You can set up a script to intercept the "Quit"
item as follows:
on doMenu theItem
if theItem is "Quit HyperCard" then
beep
ask password "Please type the access password."
if it is not "the password" then -- or whatever password you want
beep
answer "Sorry, you do not have authorization to Quit this stack."
else
pass doMenu
end if
else
pass doMenu -- THIS LINE IS VERY IMPORTANT!
end if
end doMenu
A few notes about this handler:
- You must remember to pass doMenu commands other than Quit. If you neglect
to do so, you will lock yourself out of all menu items.
- You may want to trap doMenu "Open..." as well, since otherwise the user
could go to another stack and Quit from there.
As for your other question: you can set HyperCard as the startup application
in the Finder, then place a command to go to the selected stack in the Home
stack's openStack handler.
jeanne a. e. devoto
jdevoto@apple.comboz@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (John Boswell) (03/09/89)
Just my $0.02: Simply putting an "on doMenu" item will not prevent someone from typing commands directly from the msg box. (Such as "open _document_ with Microsoft Word", or "Go stack foo"). You should also trap for unauthorized departure by putting an "on closeStack" handler in the stack script. This handler could ask for a password, etc. Hope this helps, ************************************************************************* John Boswell boz@eleazar.dartmouth.edu Dept. of Chemistry boz@dartCMS1.BITNET Dartmouth College, Hangover, Nude Hampster 03755