382 Appendix A: Controlling iTools from the IDL Command Line
Retrieving Component Identifiers iTool Developer’s Guide
Retrieving Component Identifiers
In order to affect an item within an iTool — change a property of a visualization, for
example, or apply an operation — you must first retrieve the identifier for the item.
iTool identifiers are described in detail in “iTool Object Identifiers” on page 28.
In the case of operations, you may be able to construct the appropriate identifier
string based on visual inspection of the hierarchy shown in the Operations Browser
coupled with your knowledge of the iTools framework. Similarly, in the case of
visualizations, you may be able to construct the identifier string based on visual
inspection of the hierarchy shown in the Visualization Browser. However, the
FindIdentifiers method of the IDLitTool class lets you programmatically (and
unambiguously) retrieve the identifier of any item in the current iTool’s component
object hierarchy.
Using the FindIdentifiers Method
Use the FindIdentifiers method to retrieve the full object identifier for an iTool
component object: a visualization, an operation, a view, a window — any component
that exists in the current iTool’s component object hierarchy. Once you have the
identifier for a component object, you can use iTool framework methods to affect that
object as described in the later sections of this chapter.
The syntax for the FindIdentifiers method is:
Result = Obj->IDLitTool::FindIdentifiers([Pattern] [, Keywords])
where Obj is an IDLitTool object and Result is a string array containing the full
object identifiers of iTool component objects that contain the string specified by
Pattern. (See “IDLitTool::FindIdentifiers” (IDL Reference Guide) for complete
information on the keywords accepted.)
Note on Pattern Matching
The FindIdentifiers method finds matches for Pattern in full object identifiers using
the same rules as the STRMATCH function, with the exception that searches are
case-insensitive. In almost all cases, you will want to use wildcard characters to allow
a substring of the full identifier to be matched. See the examples below for additional
information.
FindIdentifier Examples
For these examples, suppose you have an iSurface tool created by the following
statement:
