D6 Visual Designer Bug - Can't always select inside container

I have noticed that in the visual designer, when designing a component with
items in a container that I often can't select the items in the container
- the outer container will display selection handles on the left of the container
but nowhere else (i.e. I cant see them on the top bottom or right of the
container). All I can do is select items in property inspector - but frustratingly
that is only single select - so If I want to align top of the inner items
I am stuck. I have to exit the designer and go back in.

Tim

> I have noticed that in the visual designer, when designing a component
> with items in a container that I often can't select the items in the
> container

Hey OA - any comments on this? Do you have any future views on the designer
given your blog entry on the problems with using real widgets?

It is frustrating that the designer has these small glitches. However I am
starting to appreciate how you can build small little ui building blocks
that you can test indepentantly - and then stitch together. It has a nice
feel to it, once you have started to understand how it all works together.

Tim

Tim,

> I have noticed that in the visual designer, when designing a
> component with items in a container that I often can't select the
> items in the container - the outer container will display selection
> handles on the left of the container but nowhere else (i.e. I cant
> see them on the top bottom or right of the container). All I can do
> is select items in property inspector - but frustratingly that is
> only single select - so If I want to align top of the inner items I
> am stuck. I have to exit the designer and go back in.

I've taken a look at this but I'm afraid I can't seem to reproduce the
problem here. I've tried containers inside containers etc. Can you
boil it down to a series of steps that we can follow to see this happen?

One thing to bear in mind is that there is a z-ordering problem with
Windows controls where controls that are visibly behind other controls
actually get hit tested (and therefore selected) first. So, if you
have overlapping controls, they can behave rather oddly in the
composer. We've tended to treat this as a vagary of Windows but really
the "correct" solution would be to re-implement hit testing rather than
rely on the #childWindowFromPointExt:uFlags: Windows call.

--
Best regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com