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

502 Part III ■ Advanced Addon Techniquesprimary responsibility is managing the creation and placement of frames. Asplayers join your party or raid, the secure template handles the creation ofnew frames for each of them. If an addon were to try this while the player isin combat, the new frames would be locked down, unable to be modified. Thegroup headers enable your addon to do last-minute configuration before theframe is ever locked down.The process for creating a new group header is roughly as follows:1. Create a new header frame that inherits from SecureGroupHeaderTemplate. This may be a custom XML template that inherits from theBlizzard template and adds things such as artwork and labels, or just theraw template itself.2. Set attributes on the new header for some of the following:What characters, classes, groups should be displayed in the header?Should the header be displayed when the player is in a party, raid,solo, or all of the above?When new frames are created, how should they be anchored to theexisting frames?How should the frames be sorted?Should the frames be grouped, or displayed in columns and rows?3. Supply an XML template (optionally) that the header will use to createnew unit frames. Again, this could just be the standard SecureUnitButtonor a custom template with artwork and other elements.4. Provide a configuration function (optionally) that will be called whena new unit frame is created, allowing for last-minute customization byaddons.Of course, creating a fully functional raid addon is a bit more complicatedthan this, but once you’ve mastered the basics of using the template, otherfeatures can be added to your addon as necessary.Configuration OptionsA SecureGroupHeader has plenty of options that can be set using attributes.These options can be grouped into three major classes: filtering, grouping andsorting, and display. Tables 26-1, 26-2, and 26-3 describe these attributes.When specifying a groupBy attribute, you must also supply a groupingOrderor the template will encounter an error, because groupingOrder doesn’t haveany default values.