When you click on any object on the form, the property browser automatically shows you the current value of all the properties of the object. You can tab around to change the numbers, and when you press <Enter> or leave any field, the object will be updated to match. The pull-down choices are updated immediately when you click on a new selection.

All objects have the Behaviour and Groups properties. You will find that the remaining buttons and fields vary depending on how the object has been specified in its class namespace. Click on the various objects on your form and tab around the properties to see what you can change.

The example shows a Spin Box which has a good mixture of property types. The style button opens a multi-select list where you can add generic styles to the objects. Buttons labelled in green set User properties (bi-directional APL expressions) and blue buttons are Runtime properties (any APL expressions). When you come to design your own classes, you will find that user-defined property types are also represented as simple buttons, which call your own property-maintenance functions.

Text and numeric properties (such as ‘Hint’ and ‘Delay’) are simply entered in the fields – you will find that any numeric fields have built-in spin behaviour on the up and down arrow keys. If the text is too long for the space provided, just use the ‘...’ button to bring up a small notepad.

Boolean and ‘OneOf’ properties can be selected from a dropdown, and any ‘ManyOf’ properties will be shown as a button which invokes a pop-up multiple selection.

As you assign non-default values to the various properties, the adjacent labels are changed to red, and where possible, the button captions are also updated to reflect the new values. Here is the same object with some properties set:

Here you can see that two styles have been selected, the control is watching variable ‘count, and it is stepping in 10s.

The delay before first repeat is left to default, but it is spinning faster and tracking has been turned off to prevent other controls which depend on this variable updating as the control spins. The labels adjacent to all the non-default properties are red – these are the only values which will be saved in the dialogue-box definition.

Setting common properties on several objects

In this example, a simple text-edit box has been selected in addition to the spin box. You will see that only those properties in common between the two objects are now available to be changed. Any changes made will be set for all the selected objects. This gives you a quick way of replicating some properties across several objects, for example the typeface or colour on more than one label at at time.

Copying specific properties between objects

When you select Copy,Properties from the right-mouse menu you are allowed to select only those properties which you want to propagate to other objects. You can then use Edit,Paste to set these properties in one or more other objects, depending what is selected.