Richard,
it wasn't that you over-wrote it - the problem was I over-thought it.
My excuse is that I have been thinking quite a bit this last week about
whether there was a (simple enough) approach to layout that would allow
"rows & columns" semi-flow layout to be nearly automatic, and be
possible to provide a UI that would make it practical (and quick) to
provide extra guidance to such a system.
You message just happened to fit into that thought exercise - causing me
to over-complicate things.
So my apologies. I think what you wrote was perfectly clear, it just
didn't happen to be the same as I was working on :-)
Alex.
On 28/04/2020 16:22, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
Very good thoughts there, Alex.
The assumptions you list would be important to keep in mind if one
were aiming to generalize basic layout handling, with libraries that
have nicely-designed APIs, or even further with virtual props that
would lend themselves well to reducing things further to simple
point-and-click authoring.
But in this exercise I'm making no assumptions at all; I'm just
looking at the UI and writing purpose-built code to make it do what I
want.
And with only a dozen lines, why not?
There's good value in generalizing app development. Data binding is
ripe with unexplored opportunities, as are field entry validation,
window management, menu management, exception handling and reporting,
socket comms, and many other things we write.
Sometimes we make tools or libraries to reduce the scripting we would
use to deliver those.
Sometimes we generalize far enough to reduce it further to assigning
the desired behavior with property settings which would then lend
themselves to a point-and-click development workflow.
But often we just write a few lines of script to do what we want to do
for the case at hand and be done with it.
The draft Lesson I posted serves only as a reminder that placing
objects where we want them isn't all that deep, and if we use groups
well we can reduce that scripting even farther.
That this wasn't clear in the writing suggests the draft is possibly
too long. "Set the loc of <object> to <loc>" doesn't really require a
whole page.
Different apps require different code. Layout is the least of it.
LiveCode is a scripting language. We script.
And when we look at the apps we use from others, regardless what tool
they're written in, we see those authors do the same thing: they look
at their layout, consider what they want to communicate to the user,
and put things where they want them to support that.
What I had tried to convey was that putting things where you want them
is neither mysterious nor difficult in a nice language like LC.
Clearly I overwrote.
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