Dragline Control

[Bidmaron]

Minty, my friend, just use it. I didn’t do it for credit. Now if you insist, just say based on Bidmaron’s dragline control but my work is for the community.

[Bidmaron]

I just fixed one error in the original post because the include file for the dragline lua code was the wrong name in the template. Thanks, minty for pointing this out.

[Minty23185Fresh]

The author of the control, Bidmaron, developed the control using text based controls (stringcontrols).

My intention is to use the Dragline Control with Windowlists rather than Stringcontrols. I am just about there but I have run across a "strangeness" with scrollbars. When the dragline is dragged sufficiently far, causing a windowlist to shrink in height, it's associated scrollbar will eventually become invisible.

It's my assumption that: If a scrollbar is made too short, so that it can no longer resolve the items in say a list or a multiline textbox, the scrollbar fails and becomes invisible.

Does anyone know if this statement is true?

A visual example might help. I'm using the CoreRPG ruleset. I am adding additional functionality (plus the Dragline Control) to my Field Filters for All Libraries Extension. The following panels show the NPC Library Editor. There are two windowlist controls, a list of NPCs in the upper portion and the field filter list in the lower portion. Each list contains six items; all six are displayed in the upper portion only five are displayed in the lower portion, but there is a scrollbar available to gain access to the sixth item of the lower list. The Dragline Control is a very thin gray line right at the bottom of the upper list's frame.

In the screenshots below, the first, left most panel, depicts the editor at startup. The second panel shows the editor after I have dragged the Dragline Control up about 1/4 of the dialog's height. The upper list shows only four items, but has a scrollbar to access the other two items. The lower list now displays all six items and no scroll bar is displayed (because the windowlist is now of sufficient height to display all items in the list, a scrollbar is not necessary). The blank area below the lower list is the additional, unused area of the heightened second list. For the third panel, upper right, I dragged the Dragline up to the point that the scrollbar for the upper list failed and disappeared (highlighted with the red rectangle). Then I dragged the Draglne downward sufficiently to cause the scrollbar for the lower list to fail and disappear. Finally, in the fifth panel, I dragged the dragline up just the tiniest bit, such that the scrollbar became visible, but notice how the scrollbar's slider takes up nearly all of the scrollbar's height. Trying to use the slider to manipulate the list to the desired item is nearly impossible. This is what led me to believe that if the scrollbar length is too short, such that the slider cannot be used to accurately run through the items, it fails and disappears. (Note that there were no error indications thrown to either the Chat or the Debug.console when the scrollbar failed to display.)

In this particular instance, a height of two list items seems to be the cutoff. If the list is collapsed to two or less items the scrollbar fails.

scroll_fails.png

For a user of an extension that employs the Dragline Control, having no scrollbar to access the complete list is unacceptable behavior (let alone it would probably be confusing to the user). To circumvent this issue I plan to add sufficient lua script to prevent the user from dragging the Dragline to extremes that would collapse either list to less than three list items high.

[Bidmaron]

Minty, I am seeing the same behavior just in a text control that the scrollbar vanishes if you shrink less than 3 lines. Now in a text box, that isn't much of a big deal because you can just put the cursor in the box and arrow up and down to see all the contents. Of course, you have to have the window unlocked for editing to do that. In a window list, that might not be so easy to see everything....

I think your solution of not shrinking that small is a good one, but you might want to let him shrink to no less than 3 lines or the number of lines in the window (if there are only 2 lines, why can't he shrink to 2 lines).

By the way, Minty, I haven't gotten to your list of stuff in this thread that I should fix. Hopefully, this weekend.

[Minty23185Fresh]

Thanks Bidmaron. Good to hear that I'm not the only one experiencing this issue.

And true, no scroll bar is needed if the list only has one, two or three items, so shrinking to those (special) heights would be permitted.

And no rush on my account to address those other items. As you can see I'm well underway given the help you've already provided. Thanks.

[Bidmaron]

No sweat. Glad to have helped.

[Minty23185Fresh]

Things are so easily forgotten in the day-to-day. It is high time I express the kudos deserved for this control. It has been in use in my Field Filters extension for over a year now, without a hitch!

Thanks so much Bidmaron for this control and for your patience and persistence in getting it going in my project.

[Bidmaron]

No sweat at all, Minty. Now if we could just get MW to put it into CoreRPG....
I need to get around to making a vertical corollary to it, but my danged job has me working ridiculous hours (last week I never went to sleep two nights working 36 hours straight - insane).