| Allegro CL version 8.2 Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2. 8.1 version |
An object-editor
is a
specialized dialog subclass that makes it easier to create dialogs
that edit instances of classes. Rather than creating individual
widgets and giving them on-change functions and adding them to a dialog,
you instead specify a single expression that parametrically describes
the slots to be edited, and then the object-editor
will automatically create widgets
for those slots and arrange them on the dialog. An object-editor
also offers a set of
standard command buttons for viewing other instances, reverting the
current changes, and so on.
Creating an object-editor
dialog interactively is described in the document for the
IDE's Class Interface Editor
dialog. An extended programmatic example can be found in the
essay Creating an Object-Editor
Dialog or Class-Grid Programmatically.
To use an object-editor
,
there are three main properties that you need to set:
object-editor
.
See edited-slots for a full
description of the format and options for this value. If the object-editor
is being created as a
form window in an IDE Project, then you can specify this large value
interactively by using the IDE's Class Interface Editor
dialog.
An object-editor
will sort
its edited-instances by the
primary-name-slot and secondary-name-slot of the edited-class, if any, or else by the
usual print names of the instances. It will display the first
instance in the sorted listed automatically. The user may then use
the command-buttons on the dialog to display and edit various
instances, or the application can call display-instance in some other
way.
When reading and writing slot values, an object-editor
will call reader and writer
functions of any direct slots that have reader and writer functions,
and otherwise will call slot-value and (setf slot-value). Using reader and writer
functions allows applications to perform their usual side effects as
an object-editor
accesses
the slots. This is not done for non-direct slots, though, because it
is not straightforward to find the reader and writer functions.)
An object-editor
will save
changes to the currently displayed instance whenever a different
instance is displayed or when object-editor-save is called. It will also do a
save when a different window is selected if the save-on-clear-focus property is true, and do a
save whenever an individual widget's value is changed if the save-on-new-widget-value property is
true.
If you add custom widgets to an object-editor
form window in an IDE project, and
an on-change function of a
custom widget needs to find the object-editor
itself, then note that this will
be the parent of the parent of the widget. The widget's
parent will be an object-editor-pane
, and it is the parent of that
pane that would be the proper argument for functions that take an
object-editor argument.
To customize the spacing of widgets on the dialog, create an instance
of the layout-spacing
class, specifying some of its spacing properties, and pass it as the
value of the layout-spacing initarg when creating
the object-editor
.
See command-buttons for the
list of standard command buttons that are available on an object-editor
, and the exported
functions that they call.
The function current-instance returns the instance that is currently being displayed.
A special table of all instances is included on the dialog if the include-table-of-all-instances property is true.
Copyright (c) 1998-2016, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.
| Allegro CL version 8.2 Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2. 8.1 version |