[panel Top->layer=500
[ panel->layer=500 [dropdown menu for now always visible->layer=10000 - should spill over button B below] ]
[button->layer=500] [button B->layer=500]
]
I have the above scenario. my dropdown menu, according to my calculations, even though the dropdown menu is inside a panel with priority 500, it should draw on top of everything else. But it doesn’t.
What makes me think it’s a bug is that if I click on Button B, then suddendly the dropdown menu, which was at creation hidden behind button B, gets drawn on top from then on.
Feel free to recatalogue this as a bug if it is, it’s pretty disturbing.
If all the panel gadgets at the same level are layer=500, then you will usually get this behavior, the last one clicked gets drawn on top. Is the dropdown menu in the same network as the other gadgets with layer=500, or is it one level deeper? (which is how I interpreted your setup).
Bring the dropdown menu to the same network level as the others and it should always been on top. Like this:
[panel Top->layer=500
[dropdown menu for now always visible->layer=10000 - should spill over button B below]
[button->layer=500] [button B->layer=500]
]
The basic idea is that you’d want to attach drop down menus to buttons at all kinds of levels, and make sure they always draw on top
(at least most kinds of drop downs), no matter the level.
[panel Top->layer=500
[ panel TEST->layer=500 [button TEST][dropdown menu for now always visible->layer=10000 - should spill over button B below] ]
[button->layer=500] [button B->layer=500]
]
in my setup above, the TEST panel contains a button TEST which triggers the drop down.
but just like the above there are infinite possibilities where you have a drop down that’s inside a panel inside a panel inside a panel, and you want to draw it on top of your whole UI, no matter what.
We had a discussion where I didn’t want to put all the drop downs inside their own high layer number panel, because to find the origin of the buttons those drop downs are attached to in the rest of the hierarchy is a nightmare.
So maybe I’m going to go back to suggest an “always on top” flag for panels? That way I can put my drop downs where they belong but have them always draw on top.
btw, it was a while back but… when I had two components in same level having same layer numbers, it would often cause problems in a mysterious way. Ex. comp1 (layer 1) , comp2 (layer 1) , comp3 (layer 7), comp4 (layer 300). The comp1,2 would mess everything up. I could only fix it by writing a script to assign different numbers to all components in same level. Sometimes it happened, and sometimes it didn’t… i didn’t report because i didn’t know if it was a feature or a bug.
Yes, having the same layer value for gadgets should be fine if they are not overlapping, but once you start placing panels on top of panels you should be consciously setting the layer parameter to avoid strange behavior.