Hunk Mgr, Word Sol'n
Volume Number: 6
Issue Number: 11
Column Tag: Kelly's Corner
The Hunk Manager and Word Solution 
By Dave Kelly, MacTutor Editorial Board
Hunk Manager Extends the Toolbox
The Hunk what? It’s the Hunk Manager, a new way to extend the capabilities of
the Macintosh toolbox. Actually, the Hunk Manager is an ingenious way to get around
some age old problems. As you’ll see, the Hunk Manager should have been made a part
of the Macintosh toolbox from the beginning.
Problem #1: the number of resources in a single resource file is limited to
2727. Although the desktop manager overcomes this limitation, most users aren’t
using it. You can refer to tech note #141 for a description of this limitation.
Problem #2: Apple has repeatedly warned (Refer to TN#74 and TN#203) that
the resource fork of a file should never be used for non-resource data. In spite of all
the warnings, some programmers still use the Resource Manager as a database. The
Resource Manager is flexible, easy to use, it provides disk based I/O without extra
calls, data can be extracted by either name or ID number, the data is stored
transparently so the caller can pretend the data is always available. But, when these
advantages are overused, the Resource Manager will become slow and unusable. As
TN#203 says: “the TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)
philosophy applies to the Resource Manager as well”.
The Hunk Manager takes a big bite out of the TANSTAAFL philosophy. Since the
Hunk Manager was modeled after the Resource Manager, you can have your cake and eat
it too! It provides an easy way to store and retrieve “Hunks” of data of arbitrary size
and structure. You can store data in various Hunk types, in much the same way that
the Resource Manager stores resources of different types. The Hunk Manager allows an
unlimited number of records of any size, ultra-fast B*-tree indexing, and full file
sharing.
The primary difference between the Hunk Manager and Resource Manager is that
the Resource Manger stores data in the resource fork and the Hunk Manager stores data
in the data fork. This eliminates the restrictions on size, speed, and access without
sacrificing flexibility. Because the Hunk Manager calls are very similar to Resource
Manager calls, most programmers already know how to use the Hunk Manager.
Hunk Manager calls are patterned after the structure of Resource Manager calls
with only a few minor differences. You can’t access hunk data by name, only by type
and ID number. This would be a welcome improvement, but not a necessity. The hunk
data is indexed in the data fork with a B*-tree index located within the hunk file. An
entry is created within this index for each hunk when it is added to the file.
The Hunk Manager is available with Multi-user support for an additional cost.
Fields are contained in the hunk file data structure for determining if the file is shared
or not. In a shared environment, the Hunk Manager operates like a bulletin board,
allowing hunks to be added, created, changed, or removed a hunk at a time by anyone
sharing the file.
The Hunk Manager is provided as a linkable object code library with a 20 page
manual. If I didn’t know better I would have thought the manual was already a part of
Inside Macintosh. The style and format is consistent with the style and format you’re
used to seeing in Inside Macintosh.
I’ve included a demo I’ve written to that shows the similarity of the Hunk
Manager and Resource Manager. The demo is found on the source code disk for this
month. My demo allows you to create a hunk file, add data to it, view the data, sort the
data, and add the sorted data to the hunk. It doesn’t really do much, but should give you
an idea of the Hunk Manager.
Now for the good news the Hunk Manager is now available for MPW C, MPW
Pascal, Think C, and Think Pascal. This means that nearly every programmer can use
the Hunk Manager in his own programming environment. Also, after buying the Hunk
Manager, no additional royalties are required. The only requirement is that you must
put the Gettys Group’s copyright notice on your product.
You can watch for additional features to be released in upcoming versions of the
Hunk Manager. These include: MS-DOS compatibility, automatic data compression, and
automatic data encryption. Even without these additions, the Hunk Manager is a
valuable tool which should be added to your library.
The Hunk Manager is available from:
The Gettys Group
401 E. Illinois Street, Suite 600
Chicago, Illinois 60611
312-836-4222
FAX: 312-836-4220
Price: $295 Single User and #395 Multi-User.
No additional royalties are required.
No copy protection.
Word Solution breaks the 32K Limit!
Have you ever tried to write a “real” word processor as a part of your
application? That’s right, a full featured word processor to supplement the
application you are writing. It’s not too hard to use Text Edit calls to create a simple
editor, but Text Edit is limited. First, Text Edit only supports up to 32K of text. In
addition, you can only have one font, one font size, and one style for the whole
document. Besides, you’ve been warned not to abuse the managers (Tech note #203).
The TextEdit package is not a database. If you have tried to overcome these limitations,
you probably spent hours of time (6 months or more) with results less than desirable.
It’s very likely that you don’t have that kind of time to spend on the text editing portion
of your application; after all, the application isn’t a word processor, that’s only part
of it.
There is a word solution. DataPak Software has released (originally released in
May 1990) Word Solution Engine, an object code module that adds full featured word
processing routines to your application. WS-Engine is the result of years of
development. Years of development usually means years of headaches. As the
author/developer, Gary Crandall says, “Creating good text editing on the Mac is a stark
nightmare, to say the least”.
“Just when you think you have it solved, you try handling more than five lines of
text and it’s DOG CITY. What’s worse, your word-wrapping, font changes and
mouse-dragging routines become so complex you wake up in the middle of the night
screaming and being chased by animated bomb screens, chanting ‘ERROR ID=02,
ERROR ID=02 ...!’” At this point you should be reminded that re-inventing the wheel
could cost you much more than the mere $300 that WS-Engine costs.
WS-Engine primarily supports MPW Pascal, MPW C, MPW Assembler, Think C,
and Think Pascal. That takes care of the most popular environments. There are two
ways you can use WS-Engine: 1) you can use the linkable object code, or 2) you can
use the res object which runs independent of your compiled code. You could use the res
object with other languages than mentioned above because it resides in a separate
resource file. The linked object file is preferred because it can be included in your
compiled code.
A typical THINK Pascal 3.0 project requires the linked object file,
WS.Linked.a.o, and the WS interface file, WSIntf.p. Other files needed would depend on
your own application and which routines in the WS Engine you actually use (for
example: you don’t need color stuff if you’re not using it).
The details of data structures and procedure/ function calls are described in a 49
page (8 1/2 by 11) manual. The routines are presented in Pascal format to maintain
compatibility with Inside Macintosh. Examples of most of the calls are available in the
Demo program in both C and Pascal. The demo is a nearly complete “real” word
processor. There are a few bugs in the demo code, but it clearly displays the
capabilities of the WS-Engine. The demo also demonstrates the “Rulers” add-on
package that provides paragraph formatting (various tab stops including decimal tab,
tab leaders, paragraph borders and variable line spacing). The manual is also
available on the disk and can be printed out using a word processor built with the WS
Engine.
Features
In summary, the WS-Engine includes these and other routines:
• Getting/Setting Text - for inserting raw text into an editing structure and getting
the selected text.
• Display - used to display text given a WSHandle. Supports off screen bitmap.
• Events, Mice and Keys - responds to events to perform “intelligent” handling of
mouse and keyboard events
• Changing Text Format - used to change the font, style, point size, or foreground
color (Color Quickdraw) of multiple areas of text.
• Cut, Copy, Paste - handles cut, copy, and paste to the Scrap (includes undo)
• Selection Ranges & Scrolling - highlighting of the text and smooth text scrolling.
• Finding Screen Points & Words - Use this to find words (for Search & replace)
and points (pixel positions).
• I/O & Printing Support - packs a WSHandle into a single continuous data stream
to allow easy saving of editing structures to files or resources. Handles printing
of text that falls within a specific rectangle.
• Customizing Text: “UserStyles” - used to define special text characteristics such
as text width or drawing special characters, etc.
• UserStyle Maintenance - maintains the “UserStyles”
• Low-Level Hooks - used for customized text displays.
It is obvious to even a casual programmer that WS-Engine would be a big time
saver to anyone that requires word processing. I recommend the object code version.
The source code version is much more complex to use and the extra expense is not
worth it.
DataPak Software was founded in 1983 and has been developing for the Macintosh
since that time. They specialize in developer engines such as Word Processing, Object,
and Visual. Object Engine handles drawing of Quickdraw objects (MacDraw like) from
your application. Visual allows a developer to create an icon based interface into an
application. Other products include: the Printer Interface series, Executive Office,
Graphic Writer, Mac-Jack and others.
Word Solution Engine is available from:
DataPak Software, Inc.
9317 N. E. Highway 99, Suite G
Vancouver, Washington 98665-8900
(206) 573-9155
FAX: (206) 573-9269
Orders: (800) 327-6703
AppleLink: D0142
Object Code: $300.00 (introductory price)
Source Code: $4500
The Rulers add-on is $170 (object code).
F.Y.I. Department
by Dave Kelly
Note: Source code files accompanying this section are located on MacTech CD-ROMor source code disks.
The introduction of color to the Macintosh brought developers new capabilities
and new problems. Some capabilities brought problems which required information
which was not available to the average developer. Accessing the video card is one of
these kind of problems until now.
Developers often ask “How can I change the depth from my application like the
Monitors cdev does?” Apple has given in to these requests in the form of Technical
Note #276: Gimmie Depth Or Gimmie Death.
The following program demonstrates the two new functions, SetDepth and
HasDepth as described in the tech note. If you have the tech note, no explanation is
required.
Listing: ChangeColorDepth.p
program ChangeColorDepth;
{based on Macintosh Technical Note #276}
{MacTutor, October, 1990}
{by Dave Kelly}
var
someResult: integer;
gd: GDHandle;
done: boolean;
oldDepth, newDepth, Depthavailable, whichFlags, newFlags,
oldFlags, i: integer;
monitortype: str255;
function SetDepth (gd: GDHandle; newDepth, whichFlags, newFlags:
integer): integer;
inline
$203C, $000A, $0013, $AAA2; { Move.L #$000A0013,D0}
{_pMgrDispatch}
function HasDepth (gd: GDHandle; newDepth, whichFlags, newFlags:
Integer): integer;
inline
$203C, $000A, $0014, $AAA2; { Move.L #$000A0016,D0}
{_PMgrDispatch}
begin
showtext;
gd := GetMainDevice; {this gets the graphics device correctly as
it should.}
whichFlags := 1; { indicates that only one bit on newFlags is
important}
oldDepth := BitAnd(gd^^.gdmode, whichFlags);
oldFlags := BitAnd(gd^^.gdflags, whichFlags);
newDepth := 32;
for newDepth := 32 downto 1 do
begin
Depthavailable := HasDepth(gd, newDepth, whichFlags, newFlags);
if Depthavailable <> 0 then
begin
leave
end;
end;
if oldDepth <> 0 then
newDepth := 1;
if oldFlags = 0 then
newFlags := 1
else
newflags := 0; { clears the gdDevType flag in the device record
(0=monochrome, 1=color).}
if newflags = 0 then
monitortype := ‘monochrome’
else
monitortype := ‘Color’;
Depthavailable := HasDepth(gd, newDepth, whichFlags, newFlags);
if Depthavailable = 0 then
writeln(newDepth, ‘-bit depth ‘, monitortype, ‘ is not
supported’)
else
begin
writeln(newDepth, ‘-bit depth ‘, monitortype, ‘ is supported’);
someresult := SetDepth(gd, newDepth, whichFlags, newFlags);
showtext;
if someresult <> 0 then
begin
writeln(‘The result was not successful’);
writeln(‘The result=’, someResult);
end
end;
writeln;
writeln(‘Click the mouse to continue’);
repeat
done := Button;
until done;
end.