Groups ungrouping themselves

[dunbarx]

Working on a personal stack that contains many hundreds of circle graphics on a card. These are in an interleaved array, 25 X 25. Each graphic has a name that describes its position in the array, such as "row 3,7", that is, the seventh graphic in row 3.

I wanted to copy that array onto another card in such a way that the rows are transformed into columns. Graphic "row 3,7" becomes graphic "col 3,7". It isn't just the names, the placement is transformed as well. Excel can do this with its "paste special" variant of the paste command on, say, a row of cells. These can rearrange themselves into a column.

I wish that the ability to rotate graphics with "revRotatePoly" applied to groups. In that case I could group all 625 graphics in the array, rotate 90°, and write a routine to just rename each one.

That has nothing to do with this post. I started grouping sections of the array, and all of a sudden those groups simply ungrouped themselves. I cannot group any of the graphics at all now, not one, not two, not any. Only by deleting all of them and grabbing new ones from the original card can I then continue to group successfully. But in a minute, after fooling around for a while, the issue comes up again. Restarting LC does not help.

I will try this tomorrow on my office machine.

Craig

[stam]

Hi Craig,

I've had very similar apparently incorrect behaviour when Select Grouped is active in the menubar.
With this active you can't see groups (as you can select each element of the groups directly) and you can't add remove from groups as you can't see the groups.

Could this be what is troubling you?
S.

[dunbarx]

Stam.

Would that it were so. Groups just went away. I know how to use "Select Grouped", though I think that is a terrible name for that very useful gadget. I guess "Select a grouped control" was too long.

It turns out that this only happened when I copied 625 circle graphics from card 1 and pasted them onto card 3, my intention being to transpose them from a stack of rows into adjacent columns. Anyway, I made a new circle graphic on card 3 and just duplicated it like crazy, into a column of 25 copies. Then I made 25 columns from that.

No issues. I really do not get it, but as I am fond of saying, I don't need to understand how I fixed something, as long as it is fixed.

Craig

[stam]

Sorry i should have prefixed that with "I know you know this but we all have blind spots"
I mean i've known this for a while as well, but on a tired/late night session it still caught me off-guard.

Anyway glad you found a work around.

On a related note i attempted something similar. LiveCode did not like it at all. I created about 500 circle graphics to see if i could replicate your issue. LC crashed immediately when i tried to group them... so there's that...

------ EDIT -----
After restarting LC i reattempted this experiment and added 1072 circle graphics to card. I made sure i saved first, this time round
The group was created successfully. I copied it to card 3 of the test stack and the group reappeared as is - a normally functioning group, so i can't replicate your issue anyway I'm afraid...
(a painfully slow experiment as i'm using a much slower 10 year old MBP - the battery on my main MBP was threatening to explode - I'm on MacOS 11.6.7, using LC 9.6.8 ).

[dunbarx]

Stam.

Thanks for taking the time to do all that. There are glitches in the matrix, and many of them are never explained, never mind resolved. Oddly, oftentimes those glitches just go away, or some workaround is put in place and they are forgotten. I suppose it is presumptuous for humans to expect perfect behavior from our toys. It is just that we have a feeling that computers, apart from almost everything else we deal within our lives, have rigidly fixed inner workings, and cannot by their very nature become odd or unstable.

They can and do.

Craig

[richmond62]

It is just that we have a feeling that computers, apart from almost everything else we deal within our lives, have rigidly fixed inner workings, and cannot by their very nature become odd or unstable.

Many, many years ago I read, somewhere, a theory that after systems achieve a certain level of complexity
it is impossible to predict their behaviour.

[dunbarx]

Richmond.

Sounds like human beings.

Craig