World: r3wp

You can create basically any type of layout you need and it stays 
on top until user reacts to it...

Use hide-popup to close inform window

Perfect. Thanks.

My only beef with inform is that It is not so easy to impliment a 
window without border or title bar...I'm sure its possible but I 
have not looked into it too deep...

That's true. Congratulations on your FDNY project. and speaking of 
window titles, Nick A wrote a nice script for changing titles in 
a windows environment: http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=title-bar.r
(unless you really like having "Rebol" in the title bar.

just discovered a nasty bug in view event handling...  anyone found 
a way to solve the following:


if you remove a face from a layout within the action of that face, 
its "away" engage feel gets stuck until you click on something... 


everytime you hover over something else, its away function is called 
even though its not even displayed in the view anymore!

I suppose one would ask in the away function about visibility, but 
I guess that doesn't stop the away function from being run.

exactly.

I remember something like that. When you click down, the View system 
has to remember which face you clicked down on. In my DO-EVENT simulation, 
I called this face the "down-face". It remembers this face so that 
it can send subsequent "drag" (away/over) events to it, until the 
up event. Obviously it takes no account of whether the down-face 
is still in the layout or not. Pity, isn't it?

so why does it "unstick" when you click something? can that "unsticking" 
be simulated?

Simple, a new "down-face" is set when you click down (so the old 
one is forgotten).

I don't think it can be simulated. (You can try sending a fake 'down 
event to the engage, but I think I probably tried that.) The setting 
of the "down-face" happens in native code in DO EVENT somewhere.

Thankyou, closed source.

I was about to try fiddling around in the vid sdk code to see if 
some context holds the face expecting the away events.. but your 
post sort of confirms that I won't find it  :-(

anyhow, it should be RAMBO'ed, so others can see it as a known bug.

new down-face is set when you click down

 - just curious. What if you would like to do multi-selection? I mean 
 - holding shift down, and selecting e.g. some list elements? You 
 have to remember all down faces, no?

yes but not in the event system.

what happens here is that a down event always expects (and creates) 
an up event ... but since the face is removed while in the handling 
of the down event it gets mixed up and this face gets stuck somewhere 
deep  in the view core and it ends up with a reference to a face 
which isn't displayed anymore... so it tries to get that (away)  
event  to trigger over and over .


what I fear most is that the face will end up leaking RAM. but tests 
have not shown it to be the case so far.

A down event does not create an up event. You letting go of the mouse 
button creates the up event.

there is always an up event corresponding to the down event for a 
face you clicked on, even if the face is removed from you or you 
aren't releasing the mouse over it.

  there is also a move event triggered each time for some obscure reason.

The reference to the "down-face" is probably stored by View in a 
single variable. When you click down again on another face, that 
reference is changed, so (I assume) there should be no problem.

exactly.

If you don't release the mouse button, you don't get an up event.

What you're saying is when the up event comes, it is sent to the 
engage of the face that was clicked down on, no matter where the 
mouse is now.

But anyway, just nitpicking.

yes and it continues to send it away events every time you cross 
the boundry of a face !

anyone know a way to prevent text-list from picking more than one 
item with ctrl?

I need some clairfication in reading the syntax/specs for Rebol2.x 
stuff.
I'm sure there is a pattern, but I havn't seen it yet.

Example: taken from rebol.net/wiki/VID:_Styles#Derived_styles_2

TEXT-LIST
   size: pair!
   rows: block!

   selected: block! ; this way set-face will not work. need to solve 
   this.
   action: block!
   background: tuple!
   background-draw: block!

how do I know when to assign a value to a [word] i.e. 

lo: [text-list size: 300x200]		;;does not work 
view layout lo

and when not to use the [word] such as 

lo: [text-list 300x200] 	;; works
view layout lo


Question 2. Could someone give a one line (short as possible) example 
of setting all the values for this text-list keyword using this format 
lo: [text-list ......]
view layout lo

thanks in advance.

The guide you are using is for VID3 for REBOL 3, which is no longer 
in use.

The documentation you've pointed to seems related to R3, not R2.x. 
There's no header info in that page, so just guessing. 

You'll find REBOL 2.x view documentation here : http://rebol.com/docs.html

More precisely:
http://rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html

http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html#section-14	(for TEXT-LIST examples)


About your question, here's a more complete example (not sure that 
all possible options are there, thought) :


lo: [text-list 300x200 yellow blue data ["one" "two" "three"] [print 
"action"]]
view layout lo

Thank you both.  Is it possible to create columns as well or is text-list 
a single column entity?

or maybe incorporate tabs?

AFAICT, text-list is single column. Henrik has done some nice new 
components for VID, his LIST-VIEW style should fullfill your needs. 
Have a look at : http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/page0/page0.html

Here's a quick link to what you're looking for : http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/docs/list-view.html#section-3

Btw, here's another useful link about VID styles : http://www.codeconscious.com/rebol/vid-notes.html

thanks for the links.  I do have that list-view, I was trying to 
find a smaller way out.  It was missing one or two features I was 
wanting last I checked, and didn't feel like pouring over the source 
code.  about 100 pages.  My brain would take quite a few months to 
understand it.   Excellent software though.  I'll give it some more 
thought, and thanks again for the vid-notes link.  It looks very 
clean.

Digging out the old but still very good for quick VID learning vid-usage.r 
script: http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=vid-usage.r

If you want a small solution, you can use the LIST style, but it's 
a bit more complex to work with. You can find some examples in the 
vid-usage.r script (look of some examples is horrible, but it will 
show you how to build custom multi-column lists).

well.... looking back through my coded examples... I actually have 
a good working list-box with over l000 rows with the columns correctly 
spaced.  However, its missing some necessary features, one of which 
is how do i attach the vertical scrollbar to the list box.   I tried 
the vid-usage.r script but perhaps I must have missed some key elements. 
 I'll try looking at that again.

I wrote a quick example to show you how to achieve that : ]

data: make block! 16

loop 16 [repend/only data [random "012345789" random "abcdefghij"]]

visible: 5					; number of visible lines
window: (length? data) - visible	; sliding window size
cursor: 0

view layout [
	across
	space 0x0
	
	grid: list 200x100 [
		across
		txt 100
		txt 100
	] supply [	
		if row: pick data count + cursor [face/text: pick row index]
	]
	sc: scroller 16x100 [
		cursor: sc/data * window
		show grid
	]
	do [
		sc/step: 1 / window		; initializing scroller steps granularity
	]
]

Forgot to set the scroller bar size, the 'do init code should be 
:

	do [
		sc/step: 1 / window		; initializing scroller steps granularity
		sc/redrag 5 / length? data	; initializing scroller bar size
	]

or even better : sc/redrag visible / length? data

That is an excellent example.  Answered many questions I had (and 
raised a few more).  Thank you for taking the time to show me this 
Dockimbel.

I'm glad it helped you. It was a good opportunity for me to refresh 
my memory about the (powerful but under-documented) LIST style.

In case you're wondering about the block after SUPPLY, it's used 
internally by the LIST style to build an iterating function defining 
a local context where COUNT refers to the current row and INDEX to 
the current column. Each horizontally positionned face (purpose of 
the ACROSS keyword) defined in the LIST layout block, is counted 
as a column, so: txt 100 txt 100 => 2 columns.

I'm need to get the name I assigned a face when I alt-click on it. 
I can get its style, offset, size etc but I do not see a way to get 
the face's name. More specificly I have multiple scroll-panels and 
I need to know the one I'm clicking in...

What name?

a: scroll-panel [blah blah blah
b: scroll-panel [blah blah blah

I want to know if I clciked in scroll-panel a or b

if event/type = 'alt-down [face/style]

...gives me 'scroll-panel'

how do i get 'a' or 'b'