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Inside Macintosh: QuickDraw GX Environment and Utilities /

Chapter 5 - Collection Manager / Using the Collection Manager

Creating or Disposing of a Collection

The Collection Manager provides a number of ways for you to create a collection object:

• You can create a new collection object using the NewCollection function, as described in this section.
• You can make a copy of an existing collection object using the CopyCollection function, as described in "Cloning or Copying a Collection" beginning on page 5-14.
• You can create a collection from a resource using the GetNewCollection function, as described in "Reading Collections From and Writing Collections to Disk" beginning on page 5-41.

The NewCollection function creates a new collection object containing no collection items. The section "Adding Items to a Collection" beginning on page 5-17 shows how you can add items to a new collection.

The default attributes of the new, empty collection are described by the defaultCollectionAttributes constant, in which only the persistence attribute is set. This constant is defined in "Attributes Masks" beginning on page 5-49. The section "Changing the Default Attributes of a Collection" beginning on page 5-15 shows how you can change the default attributes of the new collection.

The owner count of the new collection is 1. You can increment the collection's owner count using the CloneCollection function, as shown in the section "Cloning or Copying a Collection" beginning on page 5-14. You can decrement the collection's owner count using the DisposeCollection function. This function decrements the owner count of a collection and frees the memory used by the collection if the owner count becomes 0.

You can find more information about the NewCollection function on page 5-54. You can find more information about the DisposeCollection function on page 5-55.