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Right... that's what I do now and I don't mind doing it... I was mainly thinking of the properties property because we are losing data if we don't get all the unshared properties... but I think it behaves as expected... then I got carried away with the idea of implementing it as a separate property... but I don't think it will pass the first test in finding a good name for it

but I don't think it will pass the first test in finding a good name for it

I'm not wild about some of the names we've currently got.
How is it that you can request the "hilitedbutton" of a group but not the "highlightedbutton"?

How is it that you can request the "hilitedbutton" of a group but not the "highlightedbutton"?

I expect 'hilite' was used because it was the 'standard' spelling in the computer world (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hilite).
We also have 'color' rather than 'colour', and 'behavior' rather than 'behaviour'... So you could say the engine vocabulary is Computer Oriented US English

Maybe we could provide Oxford-dictionary synonyms in the language? *ducks*

Jan Schenkel.

@runrevmark- In spite of that "wiktionary" entry (which does, btw, say it's "nonstandard"), I've never seen that in any other computer language except Director. I think at the very least we should allow "highlight" as a synonym so we don't look like idiots.

@mwieder - I was just trying to find some vague historical justification for it because the decision to spell it that way was made long before I had any involvement... It might be that it was a misspelling used a lot of years ago, or maybe for compatibility with something else.

@runrevmark- from memory because I don't have the references handy right now, I think it's probably a holdover from HC syntax. Doesn't excuse the lack of a synonym, though. What I'd like to suggest is deprecating "hilite" and encouraging "highlight".

@mwieder: That certainly sounds like a fair suggestion - either that or just wait until we get to 'Clean Syntax' and the script translator and 'hilite' can go away forever

It is indeed HC syntax. But HC also accepted "highlight", "hilight", and "hilite".

This does open an interesting question - should variant spellings be a part of the language, or should we just say 'all tokens should be spelt according to dictionary X'? I've started a separate topic on that to see what people think.

@Jacque- see the other thread, but "hilitedButton" is ok, while "highlightedButton" is not.

Looks like there is a bit of backlash about not returning unset values... I'm happy to reverse that but I think it was @runrevmark that wanted it.

To deal with the colour/pattern issue we could not return a color if that pattern is set but otherwise return a color (empty or otherwise)...

There is also some interest in a propertyNames of controlType property/function but I think that's a separate topic.

The other thing is I think it should be checked for abbreviations due to the recent discussion about abbreviations I'm thinking the properties should return the full property name...

Thinking about this some more I think that an empty value has meaning and should be returned... If you are applying properties from one object to another and skip the empty ones then the target object may already have values for those so it will union the properties rather than apply empty to allow inheritance... So... just waiting for confirmation from @runrevmark and I'll fix this up ASAP...

I think the docs describe that behavior - - an empty property does not replace an existing one in the target object.

where does it say that?