[Newbies] Beginners Digest, Vol 123, Issue 3

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Tim,

> One of the articles on Morphic says you can create composite morphs either programatically,
> using addMorph, or using drag and drop from the Objects menu of the morphic World. I have
> done the latter, because it is easier to design my layout that way. Once that has been done,
> how do I address the submorph from a browser? If I inspect my button submorph, for example
>, all it will tell me about it is "a ScriptableButton<Button>(1364754)". I have no idea how to
> access that object in order to do anything with it. This is the crux of my questions.

This is, in my opinion, the most significant limitation of Morphic for
interactive GUI creation. In the original Morphic in Self the way to
handle this was to simply search through all your submorphs for the one
you were interested in, usually by comparing the morphType string. In
Squeak we can add properties to Morphs very easily so that would be one
way to tag it. Something like:

| stopButton |
stopButton := nil.
self submorphsDo: [ :m | (m hasProperty: #stopButton) ifTrue: [
                               stopButton := m ] ].
stopButton ifNotNilDo: [ :b | b ... ].

Code like this will work even if there are no stopButtons at all and if
you add more than one the code will just use the last one and ignore the
others.

After creating the button you have to get its halo and use the red
button (menu) with the debug->inspect morph option to set the
#stopButton property.

An alternative to using specially created properties is to depend on the
morph's name. In your case it is "a ScriptableButton<Button>(1364754)"..
So:

self subMorphsDo: [ :m | (m name includesSubString: 'Button') ifTrue:
...

should work for you as long as there is only one button.

-- Jecel