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Display Boxes with Subscripts

Started ‎11-08-2022 by
Modified ‎11-08-2022 by
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Let's talk about how you access the nested display boxes within the display tree. Well, just like you use subscripts with lists and matrices, you use subscripts with display tree objects. First, you obtain a reference to the report layer from the analysis layer. Then, you use a subscript, or series of subscripts, to identify the nested object. Just like subscripts for lists and matrices, they appear inside square brackets. Once you've identified the nested display box of interest, you can send a message to it -- to change axis settings, perhaps, or retrieve values. There are a lot of different ways to subscript any particular element in the display tree. You can use the object class with an index in parentheses, so for example, references the second axis box in the report layer, and the message changes the increment of the axis to one. You can use the title of an outline box, for example, ["Parameter Estimates"], followed by the appropriate column box object class with an index in parentheses. Here the message retrieves the values in the column box as a matrix. You can actually even just use a series of index values to reference a nested display box, but this isn't recommended. The two examples shown here are targeting the exact same value in the display tree. But the syntax of the first example is difficult to interpret if someone is just looking at the code, and could be affected by changes to the display tree resulting from user preferences or version changes. The second example instead targets a named outline item, the first number column box within it, and retrieves the third value in that column. You can also use a partial character string or wildcard to specify the title or heading of the target display box. In this case, the ? character is used to replace the part of the string that doesn't need to match.