The new 8.5 object options

[aharown07]

Just upped to 8.5... besides the ability to end a script in such a way that you are at a button or tab rather than a field, I'm wondering what can be done-interfacewise-with the new functionality.

Seems like that GetLayoutObjectAttribute function should have been half a dozen functions! At any rate, can't figure out how it's useful.

Is there a "guide to using objects in 8.5" somewhere?

[Fitch]

So far the top use of GetLayoutObjectAttribute seems to be extracting information from web pages using this function in conjunction with a web viewer object.

[The Shadow]

The positional information is also useful.

Before the calendar popup was built-in, I used a calendar in its own window, but had to manually put in the field position into my script so that the window with the calendar could be brought up over the field it was for.

Now, if I still needed that functionality, the script could just be passed the name of the object on the layout and it could get the position and size itself.

The script could also do different things depending on the type of the object that was passed to it, but I can't think of a good example for that.

One more thing - the advantage of having this as a single calculation function rather than several functions is that you can dynamically ask for different things without having to use a Case statement.

I expect this was *also* done with a single function so that new FM releases can easily add more properties. I would not be surprised if a future version supported some sort of SetLayoutObjectAttribute that let you change the size/position/color of the object from a script.

[aharown07]

I hope you're right about setlayoutobject... and probably are. Otherwise, what use does something like getting object rotation have? If you can't use that to then rotate the object, why would rotation matter? Gotta be groundwork for future function... or am I missing something?