Still IDL's Table Widget

[philaldis(at)geocities.com (Phil Aldis)]

I've been using the IDL table widget, and the more I use it, the more
I get annoyed. But my problems aren't with the user interfacing stuff,
because I'm not using it for that. Although, I must agree with David's
rantings of a few months ago, on that score.

I'm howver, using it for an exact replica of insight's Data Manager.
There are several things however, that seem just not to be working. 

1. If I wish to later, use set_value, to set the value to a structure,
then I have to create it with value=struct. However, I want it to
start with no rows because at the start no data has been loaded in yet
- so how can I do this?


2.Obviously as data is loaded in, I am changing the number of rows.
However when I do :
print, (Widget_Info(tableID, /GEOMETRY)).xsize
print, (Widget_Info(tableID, /GEOMETRY)).ysize

	.......I get the values that I set it to first, which were
11columns and 1 row. What good is widget_info, if it isn't up to date?

How am I supposed to find out the number of rows and columns, without
GET_VALUE, and then using N_Tags and N_Elements on the array of
structures?


3. As for the events, well that's a different matter. I want to do the
same thing that Insight does, and when you select a cell it selects
the row, and if you try and drag a group of cells, it selects the top
or bottom one, in order to prevent multiple selections. 

However, it seems that every time I select a cell, I get a cell select
event which contains [-1,-1,-1,-1], which is then followed byu the
correct cell select event. Well what the hell is the [-1,-1,-1,-1]
event all about? There's no mention of this mysterious event in the
help. What is it trying to tell me.


4. Finally, when I do widget_info, TABLE_SELECT=temp (I think it's
table_select, it's the one which returns, which bit of the table is
selected), I get returned the value [-1,-1,-1,-1], in any
circumstance. It never changes ever !!

Does anyone out there know how to use the table widget. Someone else
must have had some of these problems. I'd be very grateful. The
documentation is chronic, and doesn't mention any of tehse interesting
features.

If talk is going to begin of IDL 5.3, then surely the table widget, is
something that must be improved.

Cheers, 
Phil
P.S. Could you please post any replies, rather than just e-mailing as
I really need the answers at work.