Re: Making things flash...

Steve Lamont (spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 19 Dec 96 05:42:45 PST

To subscribers of the xforms list from spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) :

> I can't do that, unfortunately. I don't know which objects will in fact be
> flashing. Objects decide (based on their value, alarm limits, alarm state
> etc) whether they are red, green, flashing, whatever. ('Objects' in this
> case being the C++ object wrapped around the xforms object). So the only
> other way I can think of is to give every object a timer. ...

Sounds to me as if you would have a hard time managing this even if
you could get control of the colormap -- you'd still need to manage
the colormap cell for each object, which would be just as messy as
managing the objects themselves. (I'm still a C programmer so I'm
referring to XForms objects, not C++ objects.)

I guess what you need to do is to build a 'flash queue' and add and
delete objects from it as necessary -- then you could use a simple
timer routine to manage them all by just traversing the queue for
every 'flash interval.' I don't think that's any more difficult than
managing a list of colormap entries.

spl