Thank you, Hannes. That is exactly the kind of info I have been trying to find.
Tim Cuthbertson
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: H. Hirzel hannes.hirzel@gmail.com Date: Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 5:34 PM Subject: Re: [Newbies] Beginners Digest, Vol 123, Issue 4 To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Cc: ratcheer@gmail.com
Assuming you have named your instances of TextMorph and embedded them in the PasteUpMorph so that they are in the 'submorphs' collection of the PasteUpMorph
you may access them by name from the PasteUpMorph with
self submorphs detect: [:m | m externalName = 't1']
(access to morph named 't1').
This is a moderate effort and allows you to construct the GUI through direct manipulation.
Please note as well that in a recent trunk image the halo menu list of a SimpleButtonMorph has a 'set target' menu entry which allows you to set to any target by pointing at it.
--Hannes
On 2/22/17, Tim Cuthbertson ratcheer@gmail.com wrote:
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
Thank you, Jecel, for trying to help me solve my problem. However, my plan is to have multiple sibling morphs for both the buttons and the texts.
So, I am diving in to trying to use addMorph: programatically to add submorphs to my display. This allows me to hold a reference to each submorph in named variables, through which I should then be able to
specify
state changes and act on events to and from my submorphs.
Maybe my mindset is just too old fashioned. Back in the 90's, I programmed MVC applications in VisualWorks. I thought Morphic was supposed to be much easier to use than MVC, but so far, I have not been able to figure out how to control my objects in Morphic.
Tim Cuthbertson