The ancestry attribute specifies the parent that contains the object. In windowed applications, the parent specified can be desktop, indicating that the object should be placed outside the primary region. If ancestry is specified for an object, that object is called the child of its parent object. The only objects that can be parents are graphical regions, image regions, dialog boxes, and dialog regions.

 

Action statements that change the parent object, except the change graphics or the clear graphics statements, also change all of its children. For example, if a parent is made invisible, all of its children become invisible; if it is moved, all of its children move along with it.

 

For example:

 

graphical region Panel size 300 200 at position 100 100

    in ControlDisplay

 

key Control1 at position 50 50 in Panel in

ControlDisplay

 

Here, Control1 is the child of Panel, and Panel is the child of ControlDisplay. Another way of saying this is that ControlDisplay is the parent of Panel, and Panel is the parent of Control1.

 

If you specify another key in Panel:

 

key Control2 at position 75 75 in Panel in

ControlDisplay

 

Control1 and Control2 are siblings. If ControlDisplay is changed in size or position or in any other way, both Control1 and Control2 are similarly affected.

 

If you do not specify ancestry in an object definition, then the ancestor is by default the primary region.

 

See The Ancestor Coordinate System for more information.