Beginner confused with table lua and layout-local frames.
 

Edit: Scroll down a couple comments if you wish to see my layout-local frame question, my frame question having been answered so speedily.

Hello. While I am sure this is a very simple problem I am having confusions on how to execute this. The table I am wanting is essentially a list of Minimap Children (though I want to remove some items), and I have included code in the lua to put this into my chat frame to make sure it is working. Okay easy:
This works fine. Great, now I know everything that uses Minimap as a parent. I then see however, that a couple things use it as a parent that I do not want in my table. MinimapPing and MinimapBackdrop. So now I want to figure out a way to have my 'kiddies' table say everything it did before, minus those two things I mentioned. So I researched into 'tremove' and I have fiddled with that but I am very confused with two things: how would I assign tremove with a position when all I have is a name (a name which might change position depending on what is loaded in game), and how do I impliment tremove(table, position) into the code?

Any help would be much appreciated, I am finding the online resources to be far too vague for me to piece this together. :confused:

this is not the uber-most-efficient way, but it works fine :)

works perfect, thank you! Also this teaches me a good deal too. I definitely learn best when I see these things in use. :)

Another question, since I don't feel like thread spamming I'll just tack it on here, and if no one sees it that's okay.

Okay so I've been playing around a lot with various frames doing:
I find it works for just about every frame indeed. BUT, when I /reload, it only saves the position of a couple. MinimapMailFrame for example, that gets saved perfectly. TimeManagerClockButton however, it can be moved yes, but goes back to it's original position each time after a /reload. I have also tried calling frame:ClearAllPoints() (also I tried frame:SetUserPlaced(true), this just makes errors) but it seems to make no difference at all. Does anyone know either why this happens to only some frames, or a way to stop this resetting from happening?

This is a recursive function so it will call itself until it gets all the Minimap children (not just the first level ones).
It will also not add anything found in skipframes instead of adding them
just to remove them again later.

Oh this is quite nice looking indeed, thank you.

http://www.wowwiki.com/API_Frame_SetUserPlaced

(or alternatively, save the position(s) in a PLAYER_LEAVING_WORLD event handler and restore on VARIABLES_LOADED or similar.)

Edit: I missed that you were talking about Bliz frames. A lot of them try to make sure they're in the "correct" place, and you'd have to override that. There are a number of other threads about doing that.

something i still did not read anywere:

what's the difference between pairs and ipairs ?
what is this "_" thing ?

would be great to know

also, in my addon, i use a standard for k,v in pairs(mytable) do
but i don't even use the v in the script .... I reckon it takes a "long" time for the cpu to find the v though ...

Pairs will iterate over all indexes in a table. Ipairs can only iterate over a table using integers as indexes. See http://www.lua.org/pil/7.3.html
Say a function returns multiple variables, and you only want the second variable returned. A perfect example would be UnitClass, the first variable is the localized name of the class, the second is the english name in capitals.:Right, so we now have both versions of the class... But what if you only need the second variable? You could use select, but that will iterate over the variables returned, which is not necesary. So we use the underscore character. It's supposed to be a variable that nobody will use in it's code (who will ever name his variable _?). So we use:
Advice about that depends on the table structure and what you want to do with the information inside of it. List your code if you are unsure if you are doing it the most efficient way :)

it's an iteration to update the statusbar object for each instance of "com" (combatants for a dps meter)
as you see, "v" is never used at all, since i use integer indexes
the structure of an instance in com is made like : com[UnitGUID] = { 0, 3.5, nil, "", "", nil, nil }

'for k,v in pairs(mytable) do'
expand the variable names and it comes closer to natural language:
'for key, value in pairs(mytable) do
-- stuff with key
-- or stuff with value
end

local vehicles = {"bicycle", "car", "truck"}
this table has implicit integer keys it is the equivalent of
local vehicles = {
[1] = "bicycle",
[2] = "car",
[3] = "truck",
}

ipairs works on a subset of lua tables that has sequentially indexed values like above.
for index, value in ipairs(vehicles) do
print("vehicle:"..value)
end

The table above is one where the information (the vehicle) is held by the value.

ipairs will not work on a table with non-sequential integer keys or other type of keys.
for example:
local polluters = {
["bicycle"] = false,
["car"] = true,
["truck"] = true,
}
pairs has to be used here
for key, value in pairs(polluters) do
if polluters[key] then
print("gas masks on")
end
end

Not only would leaving "bicycle" out of the list not alter how it works, but it doesn't allocate the byte required for the boolean. This could be considered nitpicking, but using this technique allowed me to decrease memory usage for ARL by roughly 40%.

Spent a while searching for threads about it but I came up nil. You think if I just set up a saved variables it will override the correcting of blizz's frames?

You're absolutely right I was aiming for ease of understanding, obviously nil is equivalent and better than setting false in the example I provided.

Note that nil activates the metatable __index while false doesn't.

Yes, if you store the position you want them at before logging off. Then when you log back in, under the VARIABLES_LOADED event reanchor accordingly. This event triggers after the automatic layout file is utilised which affects sizing and positioning.

Just utilised this myself when I lost my frame whilst trying to figure out the in game frame sizing feature. The frame sizing was given up for the moment as I have a quite fine UI to set the sizes but by just switching my positioning and sizing code to be called after the blizz vars are loaded helped bring my frame back.

This is the page I utilised my learning process about loading order from.. http://www.wowwiki.com/Events_that_f...oading_Process

Wow, okay. Saved Variables making is so confusing! I've followed a couple guides (ie: http://www.wowwiki.com/Saving_variab..._game_sessions) but, none of them explain how to put frame placement info into the savedvariable file. I'm sure it's supposed to be self explanatory but I am very lost. Anyone know a better (or more frame specific) tutorial for this? Or maybe you enjoy helping out nubs, for those of you that do I will include the very bungled .lua I have going on. As it is right now, it just does nothing. If you think the file is a total lost cause by all means don't feel compelled to help out just because I'm asking! I understand! I do however truly appreciate all the help.

I tried putting in savedvariable info to my original file, but it never worked that way either, so this version I have linked is the wowwiki tutorial version copy pasted with my own addon's info and desired functions.

Here's the working version without a savedvariables. (Well, sort of working, like I said before the reason I want saved variables is to keep the positions of certain frames that Blizz is overriding like TimeManagerClockButton. Also it loads the function a million times for each Addon, I triesd to add a 'if arg1' deal but I think my SetScript is messy, anyways.)

1) pairs() iterates through all entries of a table, don't expect any sort of order in which entries are found first. ipairs() iterates only through entries with numeric indices starting at 1 and continuing until it runs into a nil entry.

2) "_" is a legal variable name in Lua, most commonly used just to dump any returned values into that aren't needed.

3) You may omit "v" and it should only remember the keys. The function will still return a second value for what's contained in the iterated entry, but Lua will then toss it away since there's no variable to assign it to. The function will always run the same no matter if you assign all return values to a variable or not.

A note on the performance of for k,v in pairs(t), all core Lua functions as well as the WoW API are written purely in C. This is extremely fast compared to writing the same function and having it run through the interpreter. As far as iterating through tables, it takes the same amount of time to find the keys as it is to find the associated values.

This is how I've recently cottoned onto dealing with it.

I have in my SavedVariables table these set of values:
I have the anchor in text to store the name of the frame that is being used as an anchor. It's easier to do _G[name] to get the frame than to have the frame not store in the saved variables ... *table omitted etc comment in WTF files rofl*

This is how I initially fill the table up after the frame has been created. I have a set of hard coded defaults set up that the addon can fall back onto if problems arise or the user after doing some customising gets messed up and whats to reset everything rofl.
I then have these scripts set up to carry out the movement and when it is finished store the final anchor position. xsf being the name of the frame in question.

I then have 3 anchor functions. StoreAnchor, GetAnchor and SetAnchor as follows. self.Data is a table link to the saved variables table segment for this frame:
And here is the resulting WTF saved variables output since I last logged out after playing with this code. Notice it keeps track of the 'nearest anchor point' that blizz automatically uses to anchor too.:
So basically I do the following:

1. Initialise anchor as center of UIParent.
2. Make any necessary changes to anchor if the parent is no longer UIParent.
3. After moving the frame store the anchor settings.
4. After blizzard has finished its own frame movement code ( VARIABLES_LOADED) then SetAnchor to what we last stored it as.

I have some other functions set up as well to handle changes on an addon by addon basis as this is all in a file that I plan to make generic to all my addons needing its functionality but this is enough to handle a one on one frame setup.

So far it has been working as I expected. You could even validate what GetPoint returns and change it if you want it to store it a different way. Also, you could always add extra points and utilise GetPoint and the other functions to handle all points the frames have and save them all. In my case the anchors being saved are generally single anchors so I haven't needed to expand onto that area yet :D

Okay this will be helpful indeed. Thank you! So many addons use savedvariables for frames you'd think I could find an example but everything I looked at also seemed to use libs which just made me more confused. :)