Boopsi gadgets and images were designed to be backwards compatible with the old Intuition gadgets and images, so as part of their instance data, both types of objects have the old Intuition structures built into them. When newobject() creates a new gadget or image object, the pointer it returns points to the object's embedded Gadget or Image corresponding structure. Because Intuition can tell the difference between Boopsi images and gadgets and the original images and gadgets, applications can use Boopsi images and gadgets interchangeably with the older Intuition entities. Although normally considered a "programming sin", in some cases it is legal for class dispatchers to directly manipulate some internal fields of certain Boopsi objects. For compatibility reasons, a Boopsi image or gadget object contains an actual image or gadget structure. these objects are instances of the Transparent Base Classes, imageclass and gadgetclass. To change an attribute of a Boopsi object, you normally invoke the set method, om_set. the intuition functions setattrs() and setgadgetattrs() invoke this method. A Boopsi class is informed of any attribute change at that time, allowing it to react to this change. The reaction can include validating the changed attribute, changing other attributes to match, or informing other objects of the change. That is the inherent advantage of using function calls to change attributes. When using conventional images and gadgets, you generally modify the structure's fields directly. This operation is very fast. For conventional images and gadgets, there is no class that needs to know about the changes, so there is no problem. However, this is untrue of Boopsi images and gadgets. Although directly modifying the Boopsi object's internal structure would provide a performance increase over using the Boopsi om_set mechanism, altering a boopsi object's internal structure directly will not give the class the opportunity to react to any structure changes. This violates the Boopsi concept, and therefore cannot be done in general. In order to provide a balance between the flexibility of function-access and the performance of direct-access, the transparent base classes imageclass and gadgetclass do not depend on being informed of changes to certain fields in the internal image and gadget structures. this means that it is OK for the dispatchers of direct subclasses of imageclass and gadgetclass to modify specific fields of Boopsi images or gadgets. Applications and indirect subclass dispatchers of imageclass or gadgetclass may not modify those fields, since their parent classes may depend on hearing about changes to these fields, which the setattrs() call (or a similar function) provides. For dispatchers of direct subclasses of imageclass, the following are the only fields of the image structure that are alterable: leftedge width imagedata topedge height planepick planeonoff For dispatchers of direct subclasses of gadgetclass, the following are the only fields of the gadget structure that are alterable: leftedge flags gadgettext topedge gadgettype specialinfo width gadgetrender activation height selectrender Under no circumstances may an application or an indirect subclass modify one of these fields, even if the subclass knows the superclasses do not depend on notification for this field. This is the only way to preserve the possibility for future enhancements to that superclass. Note that these fields are not alterable while the gadget or image object is in use (for example, when it is attached to a window).