Ha! - d’you know Jeff, I had considered exactly this maybe a half-dozen times! Each time however, a little voice inside my brain said “Nah, don’t be dumb, of course they’re exactly the same thing!”
Interesting how Set Text still works though.
I was also going to start using the Text Changed event in the manner you describe - hence my question a few days’ ago regarding how to fire Text Changed from javascript - it was so that I could get JS to issue any number of commands back to my prototype.
But I had a bit of an epiphany two days ago:
- Most people are familiar with using hidden, carefully-named widgets to act as local variables
- Why not use hidden, carefully-named buttons to act as custom-named functions?
- All you need do then, is to fire Click from other widgets when you want to activate the named function
Well as it turns out this works spectacularly well. It essentially forces you to create a “Debug UI” for your prototype. All the “variables” can be on display as you run it, and you have buttons to manually test every custom function you’ve written - works like a charm. You can even group the controls and make them visible/invisible based on the status of a global variable called “debug” or somesuch.
Nonetheless, for any proto I do in future with non-trivial data structures, I’m going to write the data engine in JavaScript. Last week a fairly simple array-like construct which took me hours to simulate and debug in Axure, was re-written in a matter of minutes using Axure’s javascript ‘back-door’.
There is a point at which the point-and-click code-builder and associated function editors within Axure start to seriously slow down prototype development.
Thanks everyone as always for your help on this (and other) matters.
Rgds,
Jeremy.