Introduction to Widgets - Displaying Data
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The application will be getting information from a news feed and it is going to need to display the information somewhere in order to carry out its function. I’ve created a text area to display the data for its multi-line facility, and I’ve enclosed it in a frame element primarily because of the automatic scrollbar capabilities that this element features:
<frame name="dataframe">
<textarea name="datatextarea">
<data>Loading…</data>
<font>Arial</font>
<editable>false</editable>
<color>#000000</color>
<size>12</size>
<style>bold</style>
<height>80</height>
<width>150</width>
<voffset>35</voffset>
<hoffset>30</hoffset>
<bgcolor>#cccccc</bgcolor>
<bgopacity>0</bgopacity>
</textarea>
</frame>
If you set the data element to hold the text “Loading…” this is what will be displayed when the widget first appears on screen. This is important because it takes a few seconds before the data is pulled through and parsed from the RSS feed. You’ll see in one of the functions later on that the data property of the text area is loaded after the source file has been obtained.
It’s great that the scroll bar handles, track and face are all drawn for you with absolutely no additional coding when using a frame element. You can also specify a frame element that will override this automaton and can be controlled via script. Doing this is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but such an element could be used as part of a function that automatically scrolls the text displayed in the text area.
Next: Setting the Preferences >>
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