sho@tybalt.caltech.edu (Sho Kuwamoto) (06/27/88)
Is there *any* way I can get a button to detect a mouseEnter, a
mouseWithin, and mouseLeave when the user has the button held down?
Here's the background. I am writing some documentation for a program
in Hypercard. It starts off in a mock up of the running program. The
user can click on various portions of the card to get info. If he
wants info on a particular tool, he clicks on the right tool in the
palette. Etc. Well, I thought it would be nice to let the user pull
down appropriate looking menus to get help on each particular menu
item.
I don't have a copy of the PopUpMenu XCMD, and would appreciate any
pointers... In either case, I'm not sure it will solve all of my
problems for the following reasons:
1) I have a non-standard "Tools" menu.
2) I'm hosed if this XCMD will not exit until the user releases the
mouse.
What I decided to do was to simulate apple's menus using Hypercard.
(This part is long, bail now if you want) I have done the following:
1) Drawn in the menubar and put buttons on all of the choices
2) For each menu, I've made a new card showing the menu already
pulled down, and put buttons on all the choices.
3) Wrote a script that tracks the mouse and goes to the right card,
or hilights the correct menu item.
The hilighting was easy thanks to the hilite property of buttons. The
only problem is with speed. To find the correct menuitem to hilite, I
do the following:
repeat with x = 1 to the number of buttons
put the rect of button x into r
if (h >= (item 1 of r)) and (h <= (item 3 of r)) and
(v >= (item 2 of r)) and (v <= (item 4 of r))
then
set the hilite of button x to true
else
set the hilite of button x to false
end if
end repeat
Where h and v already have the mouseH and the mouseV.
It works, but is really slow. The items on the menubar itself are
declared as bkgnd buttons, and I have to do a similar thing with them
when the mouse strays to a menu title (what should I call those things
anyways!)
What would be ideal is if I could somehow coerce the system into
giving me mouseEnter messaages while the button is held down. Sending
a mouseUp to the original object didn't seem to help, and after
further experimentation, I found that it didn't work even if no button
or field was clicked on to begin with.
At this point, it seems like the easiest thing to do would be to write
my own menubar XCMD. What a pain. If there *is* some way to get
mouseEnter messages even when the mouse is down, I'd love to hear. I
don't have a copy of the APDA developer's stuff, and I've heard there
are a lot of otherwise undocumented commands....
-Sho
(sho@tybalt.caltech.edu, sho@caltech.bitnet, ...!cit-vax!tybalt!sho)ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) (06/28/88)
Much easier, and not involving XCMDs, is to write a a doMenu handler that
provids usual menu behavior when a "help" checkbox button is clear and
provides help "answer" dialogs when checked. Such as...
on doMenu choice
if choice is "Button Info... then
if the hilite of bg button "help" then
answer "Opens info box for selected button." with "OK"
else
pass doMenu choice
end if
else if ...
...and so forth.
--
Nicholas Spies ns@cat.cmu.edu.arpa
Center for Design of Educational Computing
Carnegie Mellon University