Dabbling with some script widgets. Fun, but a bit tedious at the moment, but
here are some findings and some questions/proposals.
=== Findings: (Can be me missing something though…) ===
Don’t forget that you need to click the “Show Options” button in the file
chooser and change the Format to “LiveCode Script” to be able to load your
script widget at all in the Extension Builder. (I missed this and got very
frustrated before I realised this) Often after changing the Format to “LiveCode
Script” the script file is still greyed out, but you can still double-click the
file to load… Unfortunately you need to set the format every time the file
chooser pops up…
When creating a script widget you should use the extension builder to test it.
Opening the script file, editing and saving and then creating via the command
line via “create widget as …” is a bit hit and miss for me. It might be that I
need to set things up better but even when trying the tutorials from the
mothership it doesn’t work as expected. But opening the “Extension Builder” and
then testing the widget works!
It is at the moment really easy to crash LiveCode when testing a widget. It
feels like if you have almost any error in the code you might crash LiveCode,
so count on that you need to save all the time and be prepared to restart
often! This will certainly (hopefully?) improve as this is an early pre-release
of script widgets.
When you are done testing, just close the window and LiveCode will handle
everything for you or click the “Stop testing extension” button in the
Extension Builder. If you use “Close and remove from memory” your test might
not end properly and you might just get “Your widget is up to date” the next
time you try to test it.
It is fine to “overload” properties in the widget. E.g. having a property named
“backgroundColor” Is fine and your get- and setProp will be called. If you
don’t add the "get propertyMetadata” for a property LiveCode will still add an
entry in the inspector. This is both good and bad. Good because you can test
your widget early, and bad because there seems to be no way to NOT get the
property to show up. One strange finding here is that I created a “field”
widget with some extra bells and whistles. So therefore I added properties for
text, rtfText and htmlText. Of these I only wanted to show the text in the
inspector. The htmlText and the rtfText shows up whatever I try but the text
does not!? I can set the text fine via code though…
=== Questions / Proposals (Can again be me not knowing/missing something…) ===
It would be nice to be able to add properties that NOT show up in the
inspector. My suggestion is that if there is a getProp propertyMetadata
function only the properties included there should be included in the inspector.
When adding properties there seems to be no way to control the order they show
up in the inspector!? Or is it? This makes it hard to get any logical order of
the properties. This could be solved with an “order” key for each entry in
propertyMetadata like:
getProp propertyMetadata[pProperty]
switch pProperty
case “backgroundColor"
return {
“order”: 1
…
It would also be nice to able to write:
getProp propertyMetadata[pProperty]
switch pProperty
case “backgroundColor"
return {
“type”: “native”
}
…
Or some other way to support the “native” properties. A standard group in
LiveCode can have colors, effects, and text settings and the colors and text
settings are inherited by the controls in the group unless they have their own
properties and effects are applied to the group. When creating script widgets
you then need to duplicate all of this if you want to support it, and that
shouldn’t be needed (IMHO). If it would be possible to just enable a tab in the
inspector it would be really nice like:
getProp inspectorTabs[pTab]
switch pTab
case “colors”:
return true
break
case “effects”
return false
…
Or something similar to enable or disable a full tab.
But my final say is, that even if the script widgets are in an early stage,
they are a really important and nice addition! So, keep up the good work!
:-Håkan
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