Greetings!
MetaCard has an elegant and powerful object model, but only for
prefactured control classes (fields, buttons, etc.). There have been
several suggestions on this list on how to expand this scheme so you
can better manage your own i.e. field styles: You can create controls
of a custom class (that itself is stored in a stack) just as you
would create any normal control and they would inherit properties
like colors, border, etc. from that class. This goes beyond what
template objects do, bacause setting any property of the class would
change the appearance of all the objects of that class.
The next suggestion was to add scripts to these classes, so they
could show a common behaviour when a custom property (i.e.
colorScheme) is set or read as well as when a message is sent.
Messages should be sent to the object first and then passed to the
class before it is sent to the card etc.
A group class (aka background class) would even have several objects
tied together to act as one custom control type. Coming to the
question of where to store these classes, it may be an option to only
allow backgrounds to act as custom controls, because there is a way
to store and still edit them.
What I would like to see much more than all of this, are non-control
objects and classes. I think it would be nice to say:
get the emailAddress of user "Scott"
These objects could either live temporarily in memory or be stored as
custom properties et.al.! What does everybody else think?
Regards
R�diger
--------------------------------------------------------------------
| Ruediger zu Dohna GINIT GmbH 0721-96681-63 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| PGP-Fingerprint: F1 BF 9D 95 57 26 48 42 FE F8 E8 02 41 1A EE 3E |
--------------------------------------------------------------------
