You can enable "create textual references to dropped morphs” in a workspace window’s menu (blue title bar button). Then, from the inspector, drag the field name (or ‘self’) onto the workspace. It creates a variable named like ‘transfer2694476’ pointing to the transfer morph (the thing you dragged). Access the string using 'transfer2694476 passenger’. Done.

Arguably we should make workspaces know about TransferMorphs and insert a reference to the morph’s passenger automatically (and independently of the “create refs” flag).

- Bert -

> On 14.03.2016, at 17:15, Jakob Reschke <jakob.reschke at student.hpi.de> wrote:
> 
> Thank you, but my question was not about how to read XML files (even
> though I do this for the first time in Squeak). As I pointed out, I am
> aware of the possibility to use FileStream to read the file contents
> into a string (and then do the parsing).
> 
> After getting the contents in a Workspace window by dragging the file
> into the image, I hoped there were some interactive facility to bind
> that text to a variable. In my experience, Squeak is full of useful,
> but sometimes hidden, functionality and I silently wished more than
> once to create such a variable from an inspected object without
> abusing the object explorer as my surrogate Workspace.
> 
> 2016-03-14 15:51 GMT+01:00 H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com>:
>> Hello Jakob
>> 
>> Does this
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6338
>> and this
>> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6342
>> 
>> help for zour problem?
>> 
>> Regards
>> Hannes
>> 
>> On 3/14/16, Jakob Reschke <jakob.reschke at student.hpi.de> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> is there a convenient way to bind some object (e. g. one that I
>>> inspect at the moment) to a variable in a new or existing Workspace?
>>> 
>>> Use Case: I would like to read something from an XML file and have
>>> never done that before in Squeak. After installing the XMLParsers
>>> stuff from SqueakMap I dragged my XML file into the image. It shows
>>> the file content in a Workspace, great! Now I want to get that content
>>> as a string object to later supply it to an appropriate parser. I
>>> found the string by inspecting the morphs of the Workspace (is there
>>> an easier way?), but now I would like to have a new workspace where I
>>> can work with that string.
>>> 
>>> Printing the string in the inspector and copy&pasting would be an
>>> option, but the XML file is quite large and performance issues already
>>> arise when I navigate around in the Workspace where the content was
>>> loaded. For the sake of having tried it out, I attempted to print the
>>> #fullPrintString of the string, but my VM crashed... So, is there a
>>> way to bind arbitrary objects at hand to a Workspace, other than
>>> copying and pasting serialized representations around or fiddling with
>>> "global variables"?
>>> 
>>> Of course, I could have done the file reading myself with FileStream
>>> etc. to obtain a string, but I wondered if there is a more "tangible"
>>> approach.
>>> 
>>> Best regards,
>>> Jakob
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 


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