#135 How to mark EDIT as READ ONLY

[Manfred Zindel]

I wonder if it could be made possible to mark the EDIT procedure as READ ONLY. Perhaps this is already possible, but I see no way to edit a part of the contentslist or even buried contents as READ ONLY.

[David Costanzo]

I don't understand what it means to EDIT something as READ ONLY.

If you just want to inspect portions of the workspace, you can use PO. This prints the contents to a file or the commander history.

If you want to see a portion of the workspace in the workspace editor but don't want saving it to modify the workspace, then you can use PO to write it to a temporary file, use WINDOWFILEEDIT to show the file in the workspace editor, and use the WINDOWFILEEDIT callback to delete the temporary file (instead of saving the updates back to the workspace).

If you want to show the workspace editor in a way that doesn't permit modifying the contents of the editor (as opposed to modifying the workspace), no, there's no way for an FMSLogo user to do that in FMSLogo 8.3.2. That would require changes to the FMSLogo source code.

[Manfred Zindel]

Your third paragraph exactly describes our use case. We still do a lot of work completing Little Helper and its growing environment. There is one button labelled 'See Subspace' and handled by just two procedures: EDIT BURIED. So the user can see what's below the workspace. Though this may be very interesting, we don't want the user trying to change anything. The same is true when two other buttons show him or her all global variables and properties, if any. For the moment, all we can do is giving a warning via messagebox. I'd like to return to this topic as soon as Little Helper and its environment are finished and in battle-test with 14 year old students.

[David Costanzo]

Your third paragraph exactly describes our use case.

To confirm: my third paragraph described how you could work around the problem. The fourth paragraph (showing an "editor" that cannot be modified) requires changes to FMSLogo. Did you mean that you'd handle this yourself and are retracting the feature request? Or do you want an "editor" that doesn't allow editing.

[Manfred Zindel]

        Or do you want an "editor" that doesn't allow editing?

This is exactly what I thought of. (Sorry, it seems as if I have begun counting the paragraphs at 0.)
I thought that I could tell the user: "You may read this, but please don't change it." The user should see that this is an exception though it is the kind of text that normally could be edikted.

Meanwhile I found a workaround, but still I think such a "read-only-editor" would be nice to have.