I'm just starting some prontoscript trials, and I know I got a lot of learning!

I'm organizing my xcf with some buttons on the left side that will be on every page. These buttons would activate more advanced buttons that don't get used that often.

My idea was to get a big panel on the opposite side, that would slide right to left and center on the screen.

After a lot trials, I got the sliding function to work and I was very happy! But then, I realized that this is an empty panel and I can't put buttons inside the panel, like I could on my old TSU1000! I tried to group the panels with some buttons, but when I do that, the panel doesn't respond to any function calling its tag.

So, since my whole config strategy revolves around these moving panels, I got to a point that I might have to rethink the whole thing, unless somebody here knows a way to group widgets and manipulate them, as a group. I guess I could write functions to move every and each button/panel, but that would be a big pain, due to big number of buttons/panels.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

You must manipulate all widgets of a group individually, even if they are "grouped" in the editor.

For my own personal use, I wrote a class named WidgetSet that allows you to add widgets to the set and then show/hide/move them as a group. This class is not publicly available but it is not hard to write.

I did this when first experimenting with prontoscript and found it worked but wasn't ideal. I ended up having the buttons included as part of the image on the panel and after sliding the panel in, set a bunch of existing hidden buttons to visible over the fake panel buttons

[quote]
For my own personal use, I wrote a class named WidgetSet that allows you to add widgets to the set and then show/hide/move them as a group. This class is not publicly available but it is not hard to write.[/quote]
Could you give me some more pointers? I didn't know you could create a custom class. Is that documented in the dev guide?

[quote]I did this when first experimenting with prontoscript and found it worked but wasn't ideal. I ended up having the buttons included as part of the image on the panel and after sliding the panel in, set a bunch of existing hidden buttons to visible over the fake panel buttons[/quote]
Thanks for the suggestion. I won't do this, because I'll be adding a lot of stuff later, new panels, new buttons, new activities and I don't want to keep redoing it later.


For now, I'll probably edit my sliding function, to work with the number of pixels to move, instead of start and end point, like it was working before. Then I'll try to move them all together this way. Let's see how this works out.

Thanks!

Classes per se in Javascript are achieved using Constructor Functions and Prototypes.

Javascript classes are not inheritance-based like java and other Object Oriented languages. However, there are various techniques for simulating inheritance.

Douglas Crockford wrote some early articles on the subject that can be found using Google.


In a button or page script, you can do the following.

If you do it in an Activity, use Diagnostics.log() vs System.print() as since a page is not yet loaded, System.print() will never show up on a _PS_DEBUG_ panel. There are ways to make this happen but they involved the use of CF.activity().scheduleAfter() to invoke System.print() after some time period.


// Define a class.
function MyClass()
{
this.message = 'hello there';
}

// overload toString on standard Javascript Object for all instances (class-level prototype) of MyClass.
MyClass.prototype.toString() = function ()
{
return this.message;
}; // note the use of semicolon here as you are assigning a function to a prototype member field.

MyClass.prototype.getMessage = function()
{
return this.message;
};// note the use of semicolon here as you are assigning a function to a prototype member field.

MyClass.prototype.setMessage = function (newMessage)
{
this.message = newMessage;
};// note the use of semicolon here as you are assigning a function to a prototype member field.

// Now, create and use one of these objects..
var instance = new myClass();

System.print(instance);
instance.setMessage('hello again');
System.print(instance);
System.print(instance.getMessage());
// End of example.

Now that you've got this example, search the web for Javascript classes.

IMO, it is NOT Philips' responsibility to instruct on the technical aspects of Javascript.

They suggested references in the appendix of the Dev Guide including the Flanagan book where this topic is covered in explicit detail.