Wiley-World.of.Warcraft.Programming.A.Guide.and.Reference.for.Creating.WoW.Addons

Chapter 10 ■ Saving Time with Frame Templates 177item:SetPoint(“TOPLEFT“, self.items[idx-6], “BOTTOMLEFT“, 0, -7)elseitem:SetPoint(“TOPLEFT“, self.items[idx-1], “TOPRIGHT“, 12, 0)endendYou first create a table that will be used to store the individual buttons.This will make it easier to iterate over the buttons when displaying items. Foreach index you create a new button from the template you created. Then youprogrammatically set the anchors:If you’re creating the first button, anchor it to the frame itself in the firstbutton slot.When creating the first button in any subsequent row, anchor the newbutton to the first column of the prior row.For all other buttons, anchor the new button to the previous button onthe row.By contrast, accomplishing the same thing in XML would require 3 to 5lines for each button for a total of somewhere between 70 and 250 lines. Whencreating just a few instances of a template, I tend to include them in the XML,but whenever I’m doing something very repetitive like this I prefer to createthe frames in Lua.As you move your mouse over the item buttons you can see the highlighttexture appear. This allows you to easily see which button you are currentlyhovering over.Exploring Font DefinitionsFont definitions are a bit of an exception when it comes to the template systemin World of Warcraft. Although they use the same inheritance mechanism,they work quite differently. This section looks at a specific font definition toprovide an understanding of how they work. You can find the definition ofGameFontNormalSmall in FontStyles.xml, which can be extracted using theBlizzard Interface Toolkit, introduced in Chapter 8. The code for the templateis as follows:The font definition includes the virtual attribute, but it’s essentially ignored.Remember, you are creating a font definition (which is an actual in-game object)