Re: Scrolling menus in MetaCard ? Is it possible ?
Boyd Sweeney (starnet!apple!puzzler.nichols.com!sweeneyb)
Fri, 18 Mar 1994 08:36:07 -0500
>>> In Macintosh system 7, menus will scroll when the mouse hits the bottom
>>> (or top) of the screen in a long pop-up menu.
>>This seems to be a Macintosh-only feature. There is no way to do this
>>in MetaCard. There is no support for this in the Xt/Motif toolkit
>
>Thats what I feared. But it is a nice feature of Mac system 7. Menu items
>disappearing off the top or bottom of the screen are nothing that Motif
>nor MS-Windows can be proud of.
>
>>7) use a "combo box" hack (as in Name field of the Object Font dialog)
>
>I'll have to look that up.
>
I would suggest using the combo box for your application. As Scott says,
it is a bit of a "hack" to implement im MetaCard, but as I understand, it
is a standard part of the latest motif specs. This approach allows the
user to see all of his choices on-screen, and you don't have to worry about
any "clipped" menus.
If you decide to go with the combo box, you'll want to put a mouseUp
handler at the card level. It should close the list box without changes
to the "selection" field if the user clicks outside the list box.
One point I'm not clear on about combo boxes is the status of the
"selection" field. Should this field be unlocked, and entries made by
the user checked for validity against the entries in the list box? I've
always left the field locked, but I'm not sure that this is the proper
behavior. Maybe there's a MetaCard/windows programmer out there who could
straighten me out on this issue?
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* Boyd Sweeney Scientist, Nichols Research Corporation *
* sweeneyb@puzzler.nichols.com (205) 883-1170x1775 *
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