Adobe 12040118 Using Help - Page 200

Adobe After Effects Help Using Help Creating User Interface Elements Back 200 All UI elements have a creation property called name, which can be used to assign a name for identifying that element. In the following example, the new Button element is assigned the name 'ok': d l g .b t n Pn l . b u i l d B t n = d l g . b t n Pn l . a d d ( ' b u t ton', [ 1 2 5 , 1 5 , 2 2 5 , 3 5 ] , ' Bu i l d ', {name:'ok'}); Accessing child elements A reference to each element added to a window is appended to the window's children property. The children collection is an array containing every defined element, indexed from 0 to the number of elements minus 1. For controls or other elements that do not have children, the children collection is empty. The number of child elements in a window is equal to the value of the length property of the children collection. In the example below, since the 'msgPnl' panel was the first element created in dlg, the text for the panel's title can be set as follows: var dlg = new Window('dialog', 'Alert Box Builder',[100,100,480,245]); dlg.msgPnl = dlg.add('panel', [25,15,355,130]); dlg.children[0].text = 'Messages'; dlg.show(); Using creation properties, a name can be assigned to a newly created element. If this is done, a child can be referred to by its name. For instance, the Button in the example in the previous section was named 'ok', so the Button could now be referred to like this: dlg.btnPnl.children['ok'].text = "Build"; An even simpler way to refer to a named child element is to use its name as a property of its parent element. We can also refer to the Button from the previous example like this: dlg.btnPnl.ok.text = "Build"; The value of an element's internal name property is used by the scripting user interface when a script accesses a property of the element's parent object that does not match any of the predefined properties. In this case, the framework searches the names of the parent element's children to see if a match exists, and if so, returns a reference to the matching child object. Types of UI elements This section introduces the types of user interface elements you can create within a Window or other type of container element. The Panel element The Panel element is the only type of non-window container that is currently defined. Panels are typically used to visually organize related controls. Using Help Back 200