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Beginner's Corner
Dynamic Controls
Mastering Arrays of Controls
Issue: 5.1 (September/October 2006)
Author: Marc Zeedar
editor-at-rbdeveloper.com
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 13,713
Starting Page Number: 36
RBD Number: 5114
Resource File(s):
5114.sit Updated: Friday, September 29, 2006 at 11:33 AM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
The other day I created an application with a dynamic interface. It was an XML-editing app and I wanted certain XML tags to be available on a floating palette, but I didn't want to hard-code those tags into the application. Instead, I wanted the app to read the current list of available tags from a text file and configure the tool palette automatically -- that way new tags could be added without recompiling the application. But how to do that?
One way is to create a palette with the maximum number of buttons on it. Then when I read in my configuration file, I programmatically set up each button with the appropriate tag and delete the extra buttons and shrink the window to the smaller size.
But what if I don't want a maximum limit? If I set the number absurdly high -- say a thousand -- I'd be creating buttons all night!
What would be ideal is if I could create just a single prototype button and then programmatically duplicate it as many times as I needed.
Well it just so happens that REALbasic includes a feature that does exactly that. That feature is a control array. A control array is just an array of controls. Each control in the array has the same name but a unique array index.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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