[Fxruby-users] Re: Elementary FXDialogBox query

[Lyle J. <ly...@kn...>]

On Jun 6, 2004, at 6:47 AM, Nigel Wilkinson wrote:

> Thanks, I've now got it working. Out of curiosity what class does 
> theDialog.textField return as I have had to use 
> theDialog.textField.to_s to use it as a string.

When you define an attr_accessor for a Ruby class, e.g.

	class MyClass
		attr_accessor :foo
	end

it creates a new instance method named "foo" that will allow clients to 
get or set the value of that instance variable, e.g.

	anObject = MyClass.new
	anObject.foo = Bar.new
	x = anObject.foo

So for the dialog box class from your previous example, we had an 
attr_accessor named "textField", and in the class' initialize method we 
assigned an FXTextField object to it:

	@textField = FXTextField.new(...)

So when you call:

	anAddItemDialog.textField

it returns a reference to the FXTextField object. To find out about 
what methods you can call on an FXTextField (or any other FXRuby 
class), you can consult the on-line documentation at 
http://www.fxruby.org. For example, here's a direct link to the 
FXTextField class docs:

	http://www.fxruby.org/doc/api/classes/Fox/FXTextField.html

As shown in the "Attributes" section, the "text" method returns a 
String containing the FXTextField's text. Because FXTextField is so 
smart, it also does this when you call the text field's to_s() method. 
;)

Hope this helps,

Lyle