Inspect

IDE Dialog

The Inspector window displays information about objects. The same information is displayed (when not in the IDE) using the function inspect and the various inspector top-level commands documented in the inspector.htm.

Here is an Inspector window inspecting a form:

The buttons at the top (in the illustration, Properties and Internal, other objects may have more or different buttons), indicate what pane of the window is visible. In the illustration, the Properties pane is visible and the button looks pressed. Properties are usually changeable aspects of the object while Internals should not normally be modified. Controls have an Events button listing the event functions called when certain mouse events occur over the control.

The pane has names (of properties or event handlers of whatever pane is displayed) listed on the left and the value on the right. You can modify the value by selecting it and typing a new value or clicking on the extended editor button which will display a dialog suitable for the value required (such as a a color choice dialog for a color, and the Menu Editor dialog for the menu property, illustrated).

Clicking over the name causes the value to be inspected. (Actually, setting the Inspector Style on the Workspace tab of the Options dialog specifies the click behavior over a name. A single click is the initial behavior.)

The drop-down list at the top lists things that have been inspected. Choosing one causes that inspection to reappear. The backward blue arrow shifts you back to the previously inspected object.

The status bars at the bottom show the type of value accepted (on the left) and information on the value on the right.

The Properties and Events tabs also provide brief documentation on how to access an object programmatically (assuming that properties are defined for the object). The function for reading the value of a property almost always has the same name as the property.

Thus if you notice in the inspector that an object has a property called border, this means that you can read the current value of that property with a form such as

(border my-object)

Likewise, the writer function is almost always the setf of the property name, and the initarg for specifying the property value when creating the object is almost always the corresponding keyword. So

(setf (border my-object) :frame)

would set the border property, and an initarg/value pair such as

:border :frame

would initialize the border when creating the object.

Brief help information is supplied in the main Allegro status bar when a property is selected in the inspector, and for more detailed help (or to make sure that the accessor functions really have the same name) you can invoke the Help | Help On Selected Symbol command (shortcut F1) while the property or event handler of interest is selected in the inspector.

For further information on using properties programmatically, refer to defproperties or define-property.

Common Graphics and IDE documentation is described in About Common Graphics and IDE documentation in cgide.htm.

The documentation is described in introduction.htm and the index is in index.htm.

Created 2000.10.5.