You can keep your images separate from your stack. They can exist as files in
their own directory.
>
> The problem becomes the path statement. If I don't import the graphic to
> the stack, it puts a path statement in for the graphic. This is fine for
> development purposes, but when we move our final 'runtime' to the
> machine it will be on, that path statement errors out, because it does
> not exist on the delivery machine.
You need to script the use of your images.
1) Sometime before the first runtime use of the images, you need to determine
the path to their directory. This is doable as long as you know where that
directory is *relative to* the current stack.
For example, here's your file system:
myStack.mc
stuff/
images/
boat.gif
car.gif
house.gif
text/
boat.txt
car.txt
house.txt
other/
mc.exe
In myStack.mc, you could do something like this:
on preOpenStack -- build the media file paths
global gImagePath, gTextPath
-- get the path to this stack
get the fileName of this stack
-- remove the stack name
set the itemDelimiter to "/"
delete last item of it
-- add subdirectory names to paths
put it into gImagePath
put "/stuff/images/" after gImagePath
put it into gTextPath
put "/stuff/text/" after gTextPath
end preOpenStack
Now you have the absolute paths to your media without having known them before
myStack.mc was launched.
2) You'll need to load the image into an image object at runtime. You could do
this in the stack script:
on preOpenCard
global gImagePath, gTextPath
get gImagePath & (the short name of this card) & ".gif"
set the filename of image "picture" to it
get gTextPath & (the short name of this card) & ".txt"
set the filename of field "text" to it
end preOpenCard
Hope this helps.
-- Phil Davis phild@infosynth.com ------------------------------ Information Synthesis, Inc. A Knowledge Transfer Company (503) 685-0306