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From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Dialog Edit menu, display of shortcuts (was: Movable-Modal WDEF)
Message-ID: <7085@goofy.Apple.COM>
Date: 9 Mar 90 00:27:15 GMT
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
Organization: Objects-R-Us,  Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 44
References:<39127@apple.Apple.COM> <1831@esquire.UUCP> <10672@hoptoad.uucp> <1838@esquire.UUCP>

In article <1838@esquire.UUCP> baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (Steve Baumgarten) 
writes:

> Just out of curiosity, does MacApp provide support for this?

I don't think that MacApp makes the edit commands available in all 
dialogs.  

If you use MacApp 2.0's dialog support, then users can pull down menus 
while a modal dialog is up (and of course use the command-key 
equivalents).  This is easy to do because the window is implemented like a 
normal window; not using the Dialog Manager.

Most commands end up grayed out (and if all the items in a menu are 
disabled the menu title is disabled).  Specific menu items will be enabled 
based on what's appropriate to the dialog.  If there is no selection, for 
example, then Cut & Copy will be disabled.  (This is the standard MacApp 
technique.)

As an example of what you can do, I wrote an application that displays a 
modeal about box.  The about box displays a picture which the user can 
scroll through, and the picture can be printed by using the normal print 
menu commands.  I didn't have to do anything special except make sure that 
the picture view was printable.

I once did a patch to ModalDialog that inserted a custom filter proc in 
every modal dialog.  I did this originally to solve the problem that when 
a modal dialog comes up, the old front window doesn't get a deactivate 
event.  (That's because the event goes to the Dialog Manager, which 
doesn't know what to do with it.)  

The effect is that the old front window won't disable its scroll bars.  
Also, the application will get an activate event when the modal dialog 
goes away, so you have to be careful about using XOR highlighting.

The same basic technique could be used pass command keys through the 
application's normal event processing code, as a way of making the edit 
command keys available.

Larry Rosenstein, Apple Computer, Inc.
Object Specialist

Internet: lsr@Apple.com   UUCP: {nsc, sun}!apple!lsr
AppleLink: Rosenstein1