Difference between revisions of "Object Editor"

Revision as of 11:06, 4 April 2013

Purpose

Object Editor control

The Object Editor is designed to display and edit the properties of a single UBIK^® object. Technically, it reads the MetaProperty definition of the context object (directly from the context object if it is of type MetaClass, otherwise it gets the MetaClass of the context object and reads the definition from there.

Basics

Appearance

Property controls

The control reads the definition from the current context object and displays an editing control for each found property, its appearance depending on the respective data type of the MetaProperty. In addition, it groups all editing control according to the value of the CATEGORY property, where each distinctive value will lead to an own tab page within the Object Editor. The following data types and thus different editing controls are currently supported:

Data type	Example	Comment
Bool		True or false to be read/set via a Checkbox
ByteStream	-	Internal type, will not result in an editing control
DateTime		Date and time in a combined value; format according to regional settings
Double	-	Double-precision floating-point format, optionally with unit of measurement
FileReference	-	A path to a physical file in DOS/Windows- or UNC notation; the button opens a dialog to pick a file from the file system
GeoData		Absolute geographic position combined of Longitude, Latitude and Altitude in WGS84 format; the button tries to open the current location in Google maps
Guid		Pointer to another object, represented with the GUID of the target object
Int		An integer number
String		A string value
Undefined	-	Internal type, will not result in an editing control
XML	-	Markup text in XML format; currently displayed as raw string by this control

Selective lists

String control with enabled list

If a certain property has a Selective list defined, the respective editing control will display a Combobox with all items of the list instead of the value field. The value can then only be selected from the list, but not be edited manually anymore.

Index values

If a certain property has index values defined, the respective editing control will become expandable. When expanding, the editing control will multiply itself by the number of index values and present an own editing control for each.

A multilanguage MetaProperty is actually a string property with index values defined for each system language!

Captions

Per default, each editing control shows the description string (DESCR) of the respective MetaProperty as its caption.

Tooltips

There are two kinds of Tooltips used in this control:

• when hovering over the label of an editing control, a Tooltip with the NAME of the respective MetaProperty will appear
• when hovering over a editing control wit a defined Unit (type double only), a Tooltip will show the current value computed in all other units of the same SI-Unit.

Editing

When editing a value, it will only be written back to the respective property when you leave the editing control. At that very point in time, the Object Editor also runs an integrity check and tests if the value you've entered can be stored on the property. If this fails, it will color the respective value red and it will not be stored when saving the object. The coloring changes back to normal once you've entered a valid value.

When editing a value, you can use Ctrl+Z to undo your last change!

Drag & Drop

The Object Editor control is a target for Drag&Drop operations, any object can be dropped on the value field of an editing control if the dragged object matches the data type of the respective property.

Toolbar

Context menu

This control doesn't feature any context menu yet.

View Styles

The Object Editor has two different View Styles, each of them providing different views and functionality.

List

The control will display the properties in a list, sorted according to the property ORDERID

Layouted

No functionality yet.

Other functionality