LiveCode Forums.

Having a problem ungrouping. I have some nested groups on a card, in other words Group A includes another group, Group B. I I try to ungroup Group B, nothing happens and the objects owned by group B stay exactly the same.

Any ideas?

I'm also wondering if there are any tools out there that would assist working with groups. I depend on them heavily for my app but it can be time consuming and error-prone to ungroup objects in a group, re-position them then group all the same objects back together again - very easy to miss objects when re-grouping, especially if hidden objects are involved.

In addition, sometimes the re-grouping doesn't remember the name and other properties of the original group and since I use custom properties in my groups, that can lead to a lot of reconstruction.

Coupling all that with the techniques for showing/hiding groups on tab controls by gathering them into groups with the same name as the tab they're displayed on makes life even more difficult. I guess I should also ask if there any tools out there that make life easier when handling tab controls or better techinques than the one I just mentioned.

And finally, it would be really nice if you could still see hidden objects in development mode, with some indication that they are hidden. The last tool I used did that and it certainly makes maintaining those objects a lot easier if you can see them!

Thanks,
Pete

Well, to take the easy part first, does the "Show Invisible Objects" item off the "View" menu not do what you want as far as showing invisible objects?

Secondly, it seems that you're trying to show or hide groups of objects on a card based on which tab of a tab control button was selected. If that's the case then grouping, ungrouping, repositioning, etc is the hard way to do this.

I handle that situation by having all the groups displayed on the tab control, then simply hiding them all and showing the one appropriate group. No need to ungroup, no need to reposition anything. During development mode you can toggle a group's visibility from the Application Browser.

Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to do?

Thanks, that answers some of my questions.

Hadn't noticed the show invisible objects menu item, thank you for pointing that out.

The tab control issue is only one part of the problem and I'm not trying to group/ungroup/reposition while I'm using the app, just during development.

I think I got the code for handling the groups on the tab from someone on the forum - it just hides the group with the same name as the tab that is being left and shows the group with the same name as the tab that is being opened so it's pretty akin to what you're suggesting.

I'm not seeing where you can toggle a group's visibility in the Application Browser - I know I can open the property inspector and toggle the visible property there. The problem is really that if I do that, the objects that are shown are often covered by the objects already displayed on the tab I'm on, so it's hard or even impossible to see them.

It seems to me that a tab menu control should be similar to a group in that each tab owns the objects on it. In other words, when I place an object on a tab it automatically becomes owned by the tab, revealed when the tab is selected and hidden when a different tab is selected. That would make the need for groups unnecessary. The last dev tool I used worked like that and it made it really easy to work with tabs. I'm considering trying to implement something like by keeping a list of the object IDs for each tab in a custom property and showing/hiding them as appropriate.

All that is more of an inconvenience than a show stopper, just gets frustrating when you're working to get everything positioned correctly.

My main issue is the one at the start of my original post where trying to ungroup a group that is a member of another group doesn't work.

But thanks again for pointing me to the Show Visible Item function.

Pete

I'm not seeing where you can toggle a group's visibility in the Application Browser

Click the leftmost checkmark of a group to make it invisible. Check that space again to make it visible.

I agree that working with tabs is a bit more inconvenient than it should be. It takes a bit of scripting to get them to do what you want, and it would be nice if the process were a bit more intuitive, but once you've internalized the process you just replicate it the next time you need to do it.

Thanks for that. Once again, I should have looked more closely!
Pete

Pete-

No problem. There are things about the Application Browser that are not at all obvious.