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11005 - Using Calculation Ornaments to Minimize the Number of Icons (28 June 1999) by - Joseph Ganci For instance,
novices use Wait icons quite often just the way the manual states. If they
want to have a 3 second wait, they put a 3 in the time field. They may have
a situation where they have 5 display icons, with a wait in between each one.
Once they get
more experienced, they realize they can put the variable IconTitle in the
field rather than the number, and put the number of seconds to wait as the
icon's title. That saves time when changes have to be made. What I do when
I have a situation like this is to only use one Wait icon in my whole file,
placed under a perpetual conditional called Wait, which of course is a variable
I create. The conditional feedback is two icons. The first is the wait icon,
whose time field is set to the wait variable. This is followed by a calc that
resets the wait variable to 0, which allows the subroutine to be called again.
Then, I get rid
of the wait icons and instead attach a calculation ornament to each of the
Displays. It contains the line: wait := getnumber(1,
icontitle) Each Display
icon's title is something like "wait 3 then show doggie" which allows the
calc ornament to grab the number of seconds. As soon as wait changes value
from 0 to 3 (or whatever number), it will force the perpetual conditional
to activate, forcing a wait. In this case,
because it is a calculation ornament, when the perpetual conditional is exited,
it proceeds to the Display icon to which the calc ornament is attached, not
to the next icon on the flowline. That's actually what I was thinking earlier.
The result of
this is that there are many fewer icons on my flowline. I'm not crazy about
a ton of wait icons crowding my flowline. I do similar
things with other icons, such as movie and sound icons. You have to be
careful not to do this in rapid succession within the same script. It's also
a good idea to encompass SyncPoint(0) Anyway, the Navigate
icon is really the best approach unless you really need to do it from within
a script. |