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From: dewi@druca.UUCP (Maker of Ritual Grimaces)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Help needed with requesters
Message-ID: <157@druca.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Jun-86 11:34:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: druca.157
Posted: Tue Jun 10 11:34:35 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Jun-86 04:33:20 EDT
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Denver, Co
Lines: 41
Keywords: AutoRequest, depth-arrangement

Here's a problem that has been causing me to bang my head against a wall
for a while. I'm hoping that somebody out there has some inspiration to
donate... 

Imagine a requester that pops up, with a couple of lines of informational
text, and a button to make it go away again. Normally, this one's easy -
you can use AutoRequest. But this time, there's a nasty wrinkle - the
application is an UNIX one that I'm porting to the Amiga - it's curses
based and requires 25 lines. Faking the curses was easy enough, but to
get the necessary number of lines I had to opt for one of those "invisible"
menu bars that only appear when you click the menu select mouse button.
A menu interface was grafted onto the application.

AutoRequest (and BuildSysRequest, as far as I can see) automatically adds
window depth-arrangement gadgets to the requester. At least, I can't see
any way to prevent this. So, what happens when you send this requester to
the back? Your program's hung inside AutoRequest waiting for the button to
be clicked --- but you can't get at the button to click it! Control-Amiga-Amiga
time.

This problem also turned up in the "About PDTERM" menu selection of PDTERM,
by the way. I really don't want to resort to setting up a new window for this
case -- I started hacking up "Fun With Gadgets" to suit -- but it looked like
I needed large amounts of code and copious coordinate declarations to make
it work. 

Has anyone had any thoughts about holding window and requester descriptors
in IFF-style files, sort of like the Macintosh resource concept? Having to
declare arrays of coordinates for buttons and recompiling until it looks OK
can be a real pain in the butt. I'd see this as being complementary with
John Draper's code-generating gadget/requester editor project.

		Cheers,
			Dewi Williams
-- 


----------------------------------------------------------------------
	Dewi Williams.
				uucp:	   ..!ihnp4!druca!dewi
				phone:     (303) 538 4884