parent-or-owner

Arguments: window

This function is not needed in release 6.0 and later. The function owner now returns the same thing that parent-or-owner returned in releases prior to 6.0 and it should be used instead of those functions. This function is still available for backward compatibility.

Returns the parent or owner of window. The parent is returned unless the parent is the screen and the window has an owner, in which case the owner is returned.

The parent is the window that physically contains a window. It clips the window where it would extend outside the parent, and so the window can be seen only within the interior of the parent. The window also moves and shrinks along with its parent when the parent is moved or shrunk.

The owner is a top-level window that acts partially as a parent. It does move and shrink its owned windows along with itself, and prevents its owned windows from appearing in the Windows taskbar or in the ALT-TAB application-switching pop-up window, even though the owned windows are themselves top-level windows. On the other hand, an owned window is not constrained to the interior of its owner.

In all cases, the window returned from parent-or-owner will be the window that was specified via the :parent argument to make-window, unless of course the parent has been changed with (setf parent). In the general case, the parent that was specified becomes the real parent of the window, and the window has no owner. But if the parent window that was specified is a top-level window, and the :pop-up or :overlapped flag was passed to make-window, then the specified parent becomes the owner of the new window, and the window's parent is the screen.

See also owner, parent, is-child-allowed, and see About child, parent, and owner windows in cgide.htm.

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This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.