Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!Portia!Jessica!duggie
From: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: CDEF's and Control Manager
Summary: Why Bother?
Message-ID: <3650@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 13 Sep 88 23:30:38 GMT
References: <8486@srcsip.UUCP>
Sender: news@Portia.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: duggie@Jessica.stanford.edu (Doug Felt)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 34

After seeing the MacTutor article on CDEF's I decided to see if they
were as big a hassle as they seemed.  They were.  I wrote a 'dial'
with a needle that you can drag as the indicator, using LSC.  To do
the development I called the relevant routines directly, and then
packaged the routines using the dispatch routine, then finally created
a CODE resource and tested that.

Conclusion?  Since it was so much easier to use the original package
of routines, there was no reason to bother making it a resource!

The only reason I can see for writing your own CDEF is to replace one
of the existing CDEF's with your own, in order to make cute hacks to
other people's applications.  In your own applications it is much
easier to write a unit or unit-like piece of code to do the drawing
and tracking yourself.  In other applications just link with that
unit.  You still have the modularity, and you have the added benefit
of knowing exactly what the code is doing.  In my experience most of
the code is in the CDEF anyway, and the ControlManager calls are
easily duplicated. (I have the same feelings about the Dialog
Manager... :-)

(P.S. since there is no 'sloprect' etc for a needle that pivots, I
didn't use those routines obviously designed just for the scrollbar.
So I don't know why the original poster's code, which implemented
these routines, was getting called the way it was.)

If anyone wants the dial CDEF let me know and I will post it.

Doug Felt
Courseware Authoring Tools Project
Sweet Hall 3rd Floor
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
duggie@jessica.stanford.edu