[Pythoncard-users] resourceEditor attribute limitations

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Until the resourceEditor has its own property editor - it currently uses the
runtime Property Editor (PE) - the following component (widget) attributes
can't be edited:

  name, alignment, layout, style, border

The reason you can't edit these attributes at runtime is that they can only
be set during initialization of a component; this is partly a wxPython
limitation. If the resourceEditor allowed these to be changed, it would have
to remove the component and then recreate it, which is not something you
would want to happen for all programs.

The PE is not set up to allow backgrounds or components to be "listeners"
for changes made in the PE and none of the widget attribute set methods are
designed to notify listeners of changes. If we want to support notification
on any _set (dot notation usage) or set method call we should discuss the
pros and cons.

At some point, the resourceEditor will have its own PE window which can
handle all the duties of creation, deletion, reordering the components and
so on. Until then, I'm afraid changes to the attributes above still require
editing the .rsrc.py file by hand. My apologies for this limitation.
Improving the resourceEditor is one of my top priorities, so I expect this
limitation to go away in the next month or so.

I just fixed a long-standing bug in the PE, which wasn't showing the
alignment attribute for StaticText components. While fixing the bug I
realized that the non-editable attributes limitation probably wasn't clear
to anyone except myself.

ka