Full Description of Components

This appendix contains a complete description of each FormsVBT component. Each description contains the following sections:

The first line of each class-specific property contains the property name, the access information, the type, the default value, and a description of the property. Example:


Value GP
(Boolean, FALSE)

The property name, Value in this example, is the symbol that would appear in the S-expression. The access information is indicated by the letters G and P. G means that the value of this property can be retrieved at runtime (``Get''); P means that the value can be set at runtime (``Put'').

If the name of the property is Value or Main, then you can retrieve the value of the property by calling GetText, GetInteger, or GetBoolean, depending on the type of the property, and you can set the value by calling PutText, PutInteger, or PutBoolean.

For properties other than Value or Main, you can retrieve the value of the property by calling GetTextProperty or GetIntegerProperty,and you can set the value by calling PutTextProperty or PutIntegerProperty. These procedures take the name of the property as an argument.

The descriptions in this appendix do not include the components' inheritable properties (see section [sec:inherited-props] , page [sec:inherited-props] ). All (well-behaved) components use these properties for displaying information. Some of these can be accessed at runtime, as the following list indicates:


Font GP
(Font, default on page [sec:inherited-props] )

The font used for Browser, DirMenu, FileBrowser, Helper, MultiBrowser, Numeric, TextEdit, Typein, and Typescript.
LabelFont GP
(Font, default on page [sec:inherited-props] )

The font used for Text and the Title of a ZChassis.
Color P
(Color, "Black") The foreground color.
BgColor P
(Color, 0.8 0.8 0.8) The background color.
LightShadow
(Color, "White")
DarkShadow
(Color, 0.333 0.333 0.333)
ShadowSize
(Real, 1.5)

Some components define enumerations that specify mutually exclusive choices for a single, unnamed property. Syntactically, these are all Boolean properties, but unlike other Boolean properties, which always have a FALSE default value, one of these will default to TRUE. Furthermore, specifying any of them as TRUE has the effect of declaring all the others to be FALSE.

For example, the shadow-style of a Frame may be raised, flat, lowered, ridged, or chiseled. The default is Raised, but if you write


(Frame Lowered ...)

or, equivalently,


(Frame (Lowered TRUE) ...)

then that has the effect of declaring Raised, Flat, etc., to be false.