Re: [MacPerl] 256 character limit?

[Angus McIntyre <angus@pobox.com>]

At 10:36 pm +0200 24.04.97, Daniel Fisher wrote:
>There seems to be a 256 character limit in the "prompt" portion of both
>&MacPerl'Ask(PROMPT, DEFAULT) and &MacPerl'Pick(PROMPT, VALUES)
>is this inherent in Mac dialog boxes?

I believe it is.

>Can anyone suggest a work-around?

If users need to type that much text into your interface, then the Dialog
Manager probably isn't the best way to do it. The Camel book (p. 545 in the
Blue Camel) suggests:

	"Avoid forcing prompt order - pop users into their
	 favourite editor with a form."

This is obviously intended for UNIX systems, where people are used to
working that way, but it might also be applicable (just) on the Mac. You
could have Perl kick BBEdit (or similar) into life with an AppleEvent, then
read the data back from whatever file the editor writes.

The problem is that this isn't terribly Mac-like and there's plenty that
can go wrong (people can munge the form fields, fail to save, save the file
in the wrong place etc.)

You could perhaps use Matthias' new GUI stuff to develop something using
TextEdit. Unfortunately, this is likely to get increasingly complex -
you're effectively developing a full Macintosh application.

Alternatively, if you have FaceSpan (the AppleScript front-end) it might be
possible to develop an interface in that and control it by Apple Events.

Finally, if you have some kind of HTTP server running on your machine, you
could use HTML forms and POST methods. An HTML browser isn't the best
form-filling interface, but it's not the worst either.

	A

--
angus@pobox.com                             http://pobox.com/~angus

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands,
 hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." [H.L. Mencken]



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