Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!brunix!omh
From: omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Summary of answers (how to do scrolling lists in dialog boxes)
Message-ID: <59183@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 90 01:52:18 GMT
References: <1990Dec11.215054.21152@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 28

Here's some more information on the subject which might be of use to
somebody:

It's quite possible to use a scrolling list in a dialog/window which has a
great many data items (I've used it successfully with as many as 21,000 items
as a one column vertical scroll).  It works quite well and response and
accuracy is top rate.

But... but... You're limited by TextEdit style constraints as to your data!!

Not if (here's the trick!), you don't store your data in the List Manager!

Instead, you can store your data anywhere, even in a database on your disk,
given that you can access the data fast enough so that the list manager
isn't slowed up too much.  

To do it, write a simple LDef  (this is *very* easy - probably the easiest
macintosh entity to write - see IM IV) which, in it's draw routine, draws
your data instead of data stored in the ListRecord (in which I store no
data).  It's pretty amazing how well the List Manager works when it's not
shackled by the data storage scheme that it uses.

-Owen

Owen Hartnett				omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET
Brown University Computer Science	omh@cs.brown.edu
					uunet!brunix!omh
"Don't wait up for me tonight because I won't be home for a month."