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Toolbars are "special", so you need to subclass them differently

Issue: 18.6 (November/December 2020)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,722
Starting Page Number: 82
Article Number: 18606
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project18606.zip Updated: 2020-11-02 09:51:25

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Excerpt of article text...

I saw a post on the Xojo forum (https://forum.xojo.com/t/event-definition-for-dummies-me/29133/15) basically asking how to show the mouse coordinates when the mouse is in a Toolbar. Now although Toolbar inherits from RectControl, it has no mouse-related events (due to limitations of the operating system, according to the Xojo documentation). So how can we do it?

Michel Budjaret graciously provided a great example showing the use of custom events on a custom Toolbar class (see Figure 1).

While everything is nicely contained in an OOP way, there was just one problem: creating a subclass in the usual way by adding a new class from the insert menu to the project and setting its super to Toolbar results in a Toolbar that does not display the Toolbar editor (where you can add Toolbar buttons to the Toolbar). You can add all your buttons and icons via code.

Now while it is not too difficult to add the Toolbar buttons in code, most people prefer to have a visual representation of the Toolbar in their app (see Figure 2), so they add a standard Toolbar from the menu into their project.

But if you do that, you can't customize that Toolbar with custom events. So to keep the ability to design their Toolbar visually, users have to add all that custom code and properties to the Window which makes it look a bit messy (see Figure 2b).

Do we really have to choose between clean object-oriented code and the ability to design our Toolbar visually?

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