PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED need help

[gam35guru]

Hey guys,

You're prolly all gonna see me crying my butt off in the forums over the next couple of weeks/month since I made a very silly decision to make a wow addon for my final year project of my degree =S

First off I've followed the tutorials, learnt about registering events etc, but the problem Im having with the PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED event is this:

I want to detect when targetchanges and then update the name of the new target, however when there is NO target, I get a "attempted to concatenate a nil value" error as there targets name doesnt exist cos I DONT GOTTA TARGET =S

D'oH!

Now I know what I must do, check to see if the player currently has a target, if I do **Do SOMETHING HERE** .... but if I don't.... end...... trouble is, I dont know hwo to determine that.

Im having a real pain in the ass trying to find a little tutorial on variable creation/management and variable types..... I don't know what the valid types are for when it comes to creating variables for my addon.

I would need a variable to detect currentTarget and LastTarget so I could update them and when the PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED event is detected, I would check if currentTarget == nil, then just dont process it.

It's really got me stumped guys and Im only at the first hurdle.... please can anyone help?

Muchos Love
gam35guru

[gam35guru]

Something so bloody simple ... but I didnt know what I had to check against.... this is how I solved it for anyone who gets stuck like I did....

if ( UnitName("target") == nil ) then
FontString2:SetText( "<< No Target Guvner >>" );
else
FontString2:SetText( "Target: " .. UnitName("target") .. "!" );
end


Id still like a response with regards to the variable types that can be used in wow addon creation.... or is it all just one global variable type.... for example, no difference between a variable that holds a string or an int, or a float....

Thanks Guys
gam35guru

PS. Persistence pays off ^^

Also, if any addon guru would like to make a few pounds/euros/dollars (whatever ur currency) assisting with creation/debugging of my ickle project, I'll be happy to throw some cash your way for some navigation in the right direction with whatever I get stuck with! <3 <3 <3

Leave your response here, I'll check back and send personal messages with contact info. Only people with strong english spoken need respond.... I dont speak any other language unfortunately =S

[Seerah]

http://www.lua.org/pil/
http://lua-users.org/wiki/TutorialDirectory
http://www.wowwiki.com/Main_Page
http://www.wowprogramming.com/

[Torhal]

I won't go into detail about types and such, as the links Seerah gave will tell you all you need to know.

As to your code - there's a more concise way of going about it which is also a bit more efficient, since you're not calling UnitName() twice:

local unit_name = UnitName("target") or "None"

FontString2:SetText( "Target: "..unit_name.."!" );

[Soulsbane]

You can also use UnitExists("target") to check if you have a target selected since that event your using also fires when you deselect a unit.