Chapter 8: Creating a Manipulator 225
iTool Developer’s Guide Unregistering a Manipulator
Unregistering a Manipulator
If you are creating a new iTool from an existing iTool class, you may want to remove
a manipulator registered for the existing class from your new tool. This can be useful
if you have an iTool class that implements all of the functionality you need, but
which registers a manipulator you don’t want included in your iTool. Rather than
recreating the iTool class without the manipulator, you could create your new iTool
class in such a way that it inherits from the existing iTool class, but unregisters the
unwanted manipulator.
Unregister a manipulator by calling the IDLitTool::UnregisterManipulator method in
the Init method of your iTool class:
self -> UnregisterManipulator,
identifier
where identifier is the string name used when registering the manipulator.
For example, suppose you are creating a new iTool that subclasses from a standard
iTool that is based on the IDLitToolbase class. If you wanted your new tool to behave
just like the a standard tool, with the exception that it would not allow text
annotations, you could include the following method call in your iTool’s Init method:
self -> UnregisterManipulator, 'Text'
To remove all annotation manipulators, include the following:
self -> UnregisterManipulator, 'Annotation'
Finding the Identifier String
To find the string value used as the Identifier argument to the UnregisterManipulator
method, you can use the IDLitTool::FindIdentifiers method. This can be used to
return the identifier of each manipulator registered with an active tool when you
specify the MANPULATORS keyword as follows:
; Get the tool reference and all registered manipulator ids.
idtool=ITGETCURRENT(Tool = oTool)
vManip = oTool->FindIdentifiers(/MANIPULATORS)
PRINT, vManip
An array of values is printed to the Output Log window in the format of:
/TOOLS/
ToolName
/MANIPULATORS/
ManipulatorName
Specify the ManipulatorName as the argument to UnregisterManipulator method to
remove that manipulator from the tool.
