Concept help

[Thomas McGrath III]

Hello to you all,

I have a new project in my scopes and need a little conceptual help.
Note: This concept is protected under a number of patents. I wrote a 
lot of these patents while working for this company, but do not 
personally own them. In fact, I want to write this and license the 
patents from the company that owns them. Then I want to do some neat 
things with it and hopefully sell the final application to them for my 
own personal gain. :-) I hope.....

I have a graphic keyboard to create and need a way to do semi-complex 
checking.
What I mean is there will be a lot of button checking going on.
I created a variation of this in SuperCard once before but SC did not 
have any disabled states for buttons etc. and I had to drink lots of 
coffee to pull it off. With Rev there are a lot of new tools for me to 
use and I would like some help in choosing the right approach to this.

Let's say there are 72 buttons. 8 x 9 grid of buttons
After button 5 is selected only certain buttons of the 72 will be 
available for selection. (patented)
Let's say that buttons 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65 
and 69 are available after 5 is hit.
All 72 are always visible but some are disabled based upon database 
entries. (patented)

Now entries in the Database are always associated with three buttons:
5:15:27:"my text here"
5:15:32:"more text here"
5:20:34:"other text here"
3:45:22:"even more here"
etc. etc.

SO what I want to do is to check the DB when item 1's button is 
selected and check item 2 and set the available of all item 2s that 
have the same item 1.
In the small example above if 5 were hit then only buttons 15 and 20 
would be available and all the rest are disabled.
SO then when an item 2 button is selected then all item 3's that have 
the same item 2 will be available and all others are disabled.

Once the third button is selected the text in item 4 will be processed 
and or displayed in a field. (patented)
The system will reset back to the default state and allow for a new 
item 1 button to be selected.

HELP:
I don't have that much experience with array's as such and need some 
good advice.
Would this be best as a series of custom properties?
or as variable arrays?
or would it be better to use some of rev's database tools? - I haven't 
used them before. newbie here.
Now some of you seem to be experts with these things and I would like 
to tap into your brains for a little direction.

The button behavior seems very easy in REV.
The system seems easy.
The interface seems easy.
Only the storage and retrieval of multiple items seems complicated 
especially since there seems to be a couple of different ways to go 
about it and I don't know the ins and outs of each to make a proper 
educated decision on the issue.

Thank you all very much for the help.

Tom


Macintosh PowerBook G-4 OSX 10.3.1, OS 9.2.2, 1.25 GHz, 512MB RAM, Rev 
2.1.2


Advanced Media Group
Thomas J McGrath III	• 2003 •	3mcgrath at adelphia.net
220 Drake Road, Bethel Park, PA 15102