Re: Parents & children not consistent
Re: Parents & children not consistent
- Subject: Re: Parents & children not consistent
- From: Raymond Fischer <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 12:16:40 -0800
On Monday, November 11, 2002, at 03:11 AM, Bill Cheeseman wrote:
on 02-11-10 8:21 PM, Michael Kamprath at email@hidden
wrote:
on 11/9/02 5:57 AM, Bill Cheeseman at email@hidden wrote:
I notice that the parent branch of a UIElement (its ancestors) can
include
UIElements that are omitted from the application's children branches
(its
descendants). In other words, if you walk backwards from a UIElement
to its
root by traversing its parents, you may encounter some UIElements
that you
won't see when you return along the same branch by traversing its
children.
The similar case, yet subtlety different, of this I noticed involved
sub-menu items. The parent of of a menu item in a sub-menu is the
sub-menu.
Makes sense. But the parent of the sub-menu that is identified as the
parent
of a menu item in a sub-menu is NULL. Hence, if you have a reference
to a
menu item that's in a sub-menu (for example, from an observer), you
cannot
backwards transverse to its root. You have to get the menu item's
owning
application, then transverse from the menu bar down looking for the
original
menu item in order to discover its path to root.
I looked at a bunch of submenu items using Apple's new UIElement
Inspector,
and I see valid parents all the way back up to the menu bar element.
Well,
in the case of the Finder's View > Arrange > By Name submenu item, I
see a
spurious intervening menu UIElement with the phony name "Menu".
Ah! I see what you mean. I just looked at the Finder menus with my
browser,
and there are some null parents. So the Inspector must implement a
workaround to traverse the tree from the mouse point to the root. I'll
have
to look at Apple's code to see how they're special-casing this.
I'd be interested in hearing what you discover. I spend some time
looking
for that very same code and it looks to me like the code is all in the
various UI elements and not in the UIElementInspector. But my
Objective-C
and Coaca isn't expert so I might have missed it.
But that brings up other questions: Do screen readers and other such
programs use the parent/child references? Or do they (you?) just use
the information for the object under the cursor?
----
Ray Fischer
Adobe Systems
Acrobat Engineering
408 536 2554
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