Beginners Digest, Vol 123, Issue 4

> Tim,
>
>> One of the articles on Morphic says you can create composite morphs
> either programatically,
>> using addMorph, or using drag and drop from the Objects menu of the
> morphic World. I have
>> done the latter, because it is easier to design my layout that way. Once
> that has been done,
>> how do I address the submorph from a browser? If I inspect my button
> submorph, for example
>>, all it will tell me about it is "a ScriptableButton<Button>(1364754)". I
> have no idea how to
>> access that object in order to do anything with it. This is the crux of
> my questions.
>
> This is, in my opinion, the most significant limitation of Morphic for
> interactive GUI creation. In the original Morphic in Self the way to
> handle this was to simply search through all your submorphs for the one
> you were interested in, usually by comparing the morphType string. In
> Squeak we can add properties to Morphs very easily so that would be one
> way to tag it. Something like:
>
> | stopButton |
> stopButton := nil.
> self submorphsDo: [ :m | (m hasProperty: #stopButton) ifTrue: [
>                                stopButton := m ] ].
> stopButton ifNotNilDo: [ :b | b ... ].
>
> Code like this will work even if there are no stopButtons at all and if
> you add more than one the code will just use the last one and ignore the
> others.
>
> After creating the button you have to get its halo and use the red
> button (menu) with the debug->inspect morph option to set the
> #stopButton property.
>
> An alternative to using specially created properties is to depend on the
> morph's name. In your case it is "a ScriptableButton<Button>(1364754)"..
> So:
>
> self subMorphsDo: [ :m | (m name includesSubString: 'Button') ifTrue:
> ...
>
> should work for you as long as there is only one button.
>
> -- Jecel
>
> Thank you, Jecel, for trying to help me solve my problem. However, my plan
> is to have multiple sibling morphs for both the buttons and the texts.
>
> So, I am diving in to trying to use addMorph: programatically to add
> submorphs to my display. This allows me to hold a reference to each
> submorph in named variables, through which I should then be able to specify
> state changes and act on events to and from my submorphs.
>
> Maybe my mindset is just too old fashioned. Back in the 90's, I programmed
> MVC applications in VisualWorks. I thought Morphic was supposed to be much
> easier to use than MVC, but so far, I have not been able to figure out how
> to control my objects in Morphic.
>
> Tim Cuthbertson
>