How can I create a hidden button in Shoes? - ruby

Question

In Shoes, I'd like to create a button that is initially hidden. I've tried passing :hidden => true as part of the button style, as well as calling #button.hide() after creating it, but it remains obstinately visible.
I've been able to work around this by not creating the button until I want it shown, but that requires checking to see if it already exists, rather than just using it.

Answer 1

Not at present. Buttons are still fairly unreliable in Shoes, especially on Windows. You can work around the issue by putting the button in a slot and hiding or showing the slot, but you may discover that the button won't hide again once it has been clicked once:
Shoes.app do
para 'This is some text.'
#flow = flow :width => 50, :hidden => true do
button 'a' do |btn|
alert 'Hello, World!'
end
end
button 'toggle' do
#flow.toggle
end
para 'Blah blah blah'
end
Luckily, there is a way out: slots. Slots can be given a click event, which makes them behave much as a button does. In fact, you can make fairly decent buttons out of slots.
Here's something I cobbled together. It lets you use the pesto_button method to generate buttons built on flows. You can modify it to fit your needs, including such things as using an image as the background, modifiable text (with auto-expanding width?), ability to change styles on the fly, etc:
class PestoButton < Widget
def initialize (text, opts = {})
#border_color = opts[:border_color] || gray
#border_width = opts[:border_width] || 3
#color = opts[:up_color] || gainsboro
#click_color = opts[:down_color] || #border_color
#width = opts[:width] || 80
#click = block_given? ? Proc.new { yield } : nil
#text = text
#visible = true
#flow = flow :width => #width do
background #color
border #border_color, :strokewidth => #border_width
para #text, :align => 'center'
end
#flow.click do
#flow.clear
#flow.append do
background #click_color
border #border_color, :strokewidth => #border_width
para #text, :align => 'center'
end
end
#flow.release do
#flow.clear
#flow.append do
background #color
border #border_color, :strokewidth => #border_width
para #text, :align => 'center'
#click.call if #click
end
end
end
def click
#click = block_given? ? Proc.new { yield } : nil
end
def show
#flow.show
end
def toggle
#flow.toggle
end
def hide
#flow.hide
end
end
Shoes.app do
para 'This is some text.'
#btn = pesto_button 'Click me!' do
alert 'Hello, World!'
end
button 'toggle' do
#btn.toggle
end
button 'new block' do
#btn.click do
alert 'Goodbye, World!'
end
end
button 'no block' do
#btn.click #Clears the click method
end
para 'Blah blah blah'
end