
What Is Stationery?
How Stationery Interacts with the System
When an application is installed, it registers any dataDefs and viewDefs it uses with the system. Similarly, other packages register their dataDefs and viewDefs. When an application is launched, several stationery-related activities occur:
- When the application displays the New button, it checks with the system to see what dataDefs are registered that are appropriate for that application. If there are any, it gets their icons and names and displays them.
- When the application displays an entry, it looks at the data type and finds a viewDef registered for that data type.
- When it scrolls from one entry to the next, it looks to see whether the new entry has the same data type as the old. If so, it reuses the viewDef. If not, it goes to the registry to find a viewDef for the new entry.
- If the application has a Show picker button, it is filled in with the names of viewDefs registered for the data type currently being displayed. If the user chooses a new item from the picker, the new viewDef is used to display the same soup entry.
- When the user goes to the overview, the overview must iterate through each of the rows. For each row, the application queries that soup entry's dataDef to determine the appropriate short textual description to display.
An online version of Programming for the Newton using Macintosh, 2nd ed. ©1996, 1994, Julie McKeehan and Neil Rhodes.
Last modified: 1 DEC 1996