Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!unisoft!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard Subject: Re: Want find next button Message-ID: <8716@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 16 Oct 89 02:03:22 GMT References: <144cs-sunb@massey.ac.nz> <35236@apple.Apple.COM> <15945@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <35502@apple.Apple.COM> <1662@tellab5.TELLABS.COM> <2832@husc6.harvard.edu> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco Lines: 46 In article <2832@husc6.harvard.edu> utterbac@husc8.UUCP (Margot Utterback) writes: >This has probably already been answered here, but I need a "find next" button. >I have a corporate directory which uses "find" to find the needed entry. >Since there may be several people with the same name I would like to be able >to have the user press a button to find the next occurence. I know at this >point the user can press return and find the next entry, put this is not >obvious. I tried "type return" but I just find the same occurence again! >This problem is noted in Danny Goodman's book, but there is no solution listed >there. Please be sure to let us know if you find a solution, other than Steven Schrader's idea of going to the next card and searching again. (This is probably adequate for your purposes, but not for mine; I'm searching for text, not cards. If it appears twice on a card, I want to see both, one after the other.) In general, the whole find mechanism is underdocumented and underdeveloped; I've had a devil of a time getting any sort of "Find next" functionality into my current stack project. It seems that as soon as you do anything other than hit the return key after finding, including pressing a menu equivalent key or a button, HyperCard immediately loses the current "find selection", so you are going to be searching from the start of the card again and finding the same thing again. And of course, if you do just hit return, then you've lost a measure of control over finding; if you were searching in a particular field, then too bad; return will find the next one in any field. Also, there's no control over which background you are searching in any case, and we are all presumably aware of the problems with searching for multi-word phrases. And of course, you can't bypass it and use the "contains" mechanism, because there's no way to select something after you've found the offset and length of its substring. Did I mention how stupid the hidden field handling is? I've found the find mechanism to be the single most frustrating thing about HyperCard. Not only will it just not work as you would like (if you think "find next" is hard, try doing a "replace" sometime), but there is precious little documentation explaining just how it does work. This constantly leaves me with the feeling that they must have put in a way to do what I want, but they didn't bother to tell us peons how to do it. It seems they're perfectly happy to make naive users use the message box. I'm not. -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." -- John Stuart Mill, UTILITARIANISM (1863)