MASON has facilities for inspecting objects automatically by double- 
clicking on them.  But it has no built-in facilities for user  
selection and moving.  However, it DOES have easy hooks for them, at  
least in the 2D environment.

A useful method to examine is Display2D.createInspectors(...).  This  
method is called when the user double-clicks on the Display2D (by a  
mouse listener that passed in a 1x1 rectangle at the mouse-click  
point).  createInspectors calls a method called Display2D.objectsHitBy 
(rect), which returns an array of Bags, one Bag per FieldPortrayal  
attached to the Display2D.  Each Bag contains LocationWrappers  
pointing to all the objects in the fields which intersected with this  
point.  Display3D has similar methods.

You are free to add a mouse listener, or modify Display2D's, and call  
objectsHitBy to get the objects yourself and do whatever you like  
with them.  At present we do not have any method for *changing* the  
"location" of an object, to move it per se -- mostly because we  
hadn't bothered to write such a monster yet -- but it's definitely  
doable.  We do have a hook for Portrayals (setSelected(...), unused  
at the moment) which allows you to tell Portrayals that certain  
underlying objects have been "selected" by the user -- perhaps he  
clicked on them one time or something.  But we've not hooked that up  
yet.  Wouldn't be hard to wire it I guess.

Seann


On Feb 14, 2006, at 8:03 PM, Ben Axelrod wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I recently started using MASON a few weeks ago.  I am modifying  
> tutorial
> 5 for a quick and dirty distributed network simulator.  I would  
> like to
> allow the user to select a node or group of nodes with the mouse.   
> (the
> nodes are now motionless in my simulation).  this selection only needs
> to set a boolean member variable.  what is the easiest way to do this?
>
> Thanks,
> -Ben
>
> PS. I am pretty good with C++, but still new to Java...