Re: [Pythoncard-users] Cloning a button (or other control)

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

On Jun 12, 2004, at 1:49 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:

> At 14:50 07/06/2004 -0700, Kevin Altis wrote:
>
>> On Jun 7, 2004, at 11:34 AM, Alex Tweedly wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Is there an easy way to "clone" a button ?  [ ... ]
>>> Any suggestions ?
>> You were on the right track. What  you want is the starting resource 
>> for the component or alternatively, iterate over the keys of the 
>> attributes (baseBtn._spec.getAttributes()) and use the ones you want 
>> from the component.
>
> Thanks for the help Kevin (took me a few days to get time to try it 
> all out properly).
>
> I ran into a problem with this first suggestion - couldn't figure out 
> how to get the info I needed out of it - decided to wait until I had 
> more experience looking through the PCard source before tackling this 
> one.  On to Plan B ...

Check out the code in samples/widgets/widgets.py to see how 
getAttributes is used to create component spec docs. That should give 
you some ideas.

>
>> If the component attributes may have changed since initialization, 
>> then the associated resource description will be out of sync, but 
>> that doesn't sound like an issue for what you're trying to do. If you 
>> look at the Widget class in the widget.py module, you'll see that the 
>> starting resource is stored in a private variable called _resource. 
>> So what you want is to use that. Since _resource is actually an 
>> instance of the Resource class, go ahead and grab the dictionary 
>> directly, then modify as necessary for the new components you create.
>
> widget.py has no mention of a variable called "_resource"

My bad on the suggestion above, I was working from the PythonCard 
source in cvs which will become PythonCard release 0.8. As you found 
the _resource instance variable isn't in release 0.7.3.1.

>> baseResource = self.component.baseBtn._resource.__dict__
>> # shallow copy
>> tBtn = baseResource.copy()
>> ...
>> self.components[tBtn.name] = tBtn
>
> and naturally this complained about _resource.
> OK - once again I need to spend some time reading through source code 
> before I'm ready for this one.
> On to Plan C ...
>
>> You can also look at the on_componentDuplicate_command and 
>> copyWidgetDescriptionToClipboard methods in the resourceEditor.py 
>> file if you want to get some ideas about how you could roll your own 
>> "create array" command for the resourceEditor.
>
> This worked a treat !
> I didn't actually add anything to the resource editor - but lifted the 
> code from there to put into my application. I now have a nice little 
> function that takes a button and a static box, and spreads an array of 
> buttons to fill the box.
>
> My "Boggle" game is much cleaner now - Thanks again.
>
> -- Alex Tweedly.
>
That sounds like a fun sample. If you want to post a URL where people 
can download it I'll add it to the PythonCard More Apps page or if 
suitable we can even make it a sample and include it with PythonCard.

http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/moreapplications.html

ka