# Design Area

The WorkShop Visual display has four basic areas: a menubar and tool bar at the top, a Widget Selection Palette to the left, a Design Area occupying the center and right of the display and a Window Holding Area, which displays a representation of all the separate dialog components within your design, located just above and to the center right of the Design Area.

The Design Area displays the widget hierarchy of the currently active window within your design.

To traverse your widget hierarchy within the Design Area, use the arrow keys, or the mouse. If you click on any widget within the design area, it becomes the currently selected widget: the widget is highlighted to display this fact.

In order to set or change resources for the currently selected widget, click on the widget a second time. A panel will be displayed from which you can selectively set resources of interest for the currently selected widget. The resource which you seek may alternatively be found in the Core Resources Panel, located from the Widget menu option of the same name, at the top of the WorkShop Visual display.

To add a widget to the widget hierarchy, ensure that the widget which is to act as the parent for the new widget is selected. Then, using the Palette to the left of the WorkShop Visual display, click on the button which represents the type of widget which you wish to add. Any new widget will be added as a child of the currently selected widget.

You can modify your widget hierarchy using the Edit menu: full cut, copy and paste options are available. Alternatively, you can move individual widgets or whole sub-trees of widgets around your design using the mouse: click on the widget (hierarchy) you wish to move using mouse button 1, then holding down the mouse, drag the mouse over to the new position in your design where the hierarchy is to be inserted. Release the mouse and the changes will take effect, provided that the new position is a valid Motif window hierarchy. If you wish to copy areas of your design instead of moving them, you can do so by repeating the above procedure except this time you use mouse button 2.

When your widget hierarchy becomes very large or complex, you can hide parts of the design by 'folding' or 'shrinking'. Folding is described fully in the help data associated with the Widget menu. Shrinking is described within the View menu help sections.

Normally you need a current widget context when adding new widgets to your design. The only exception is when adding new shell widgets - you can add these at any time and the Design Area is cleared except for your newly added shell. Your old shell is still available and can be recovered by selecting it from the Window Holding Area above the Design Area. In fact, all your dialog shells within the current design will be represented within the Window Holding Area and you can select any one of these to work on at any time.

NOTES

There are a number of (so-called) composite widgets which can be selected from the Palette: you can add these to your design in an identical fashion to ordinary non-composite widgets and you can change the resources of individual widget components of the composite just as simply. However, you may not edit the composite structure in order to copy or delete individual widgets from the composite. Examples of such composite widgets are the Message Box and File Selection widgets. You can, of course, freely edit any of your own widgets which you add as children to a composite widget.

In WorkShop Visual it is not possible to create invalid designs, since any widget which may not act as a valid child of the currently selected widget is greyed out and insensitive within the Palette.

Design Area editing operations are not restricted to the current hierarchy - you can cut and paste between dialog shell designs, or even cut and paste from file whole sections of arbitrary design. WorkShop Visual will, however, ensure that the effect of any edit operation is still a valid Motif widget hierarchy.

See also:

- Edit Menu
- View Menu
- Widget Menu
- Core Resources panel
- Window Holding Area
- About WorkShop Visual