Controlling draw order of Textures

[Kitjan]

I have three lazily created textures that draw on "ARTWORK" of the same frame. Is there any way for me to make sure they're drawn in the correct order regardless of the order I create them in? I haven't been able to google up anything on draw order in the API at all.

[Kitjan]

Found another thread asking the same question once I figured out how to search this site a little better. I think I can do better than making another frame, but still yuck. Is there any place to read up on how the draw order is determined? I start with a texture and a text, and when I add a new texture, it still draws before the text. This happens to be what I want, but I'd love to be able to have predicted that.

[Vrul]

Draw layers (lowest to highest):

BACKGROUND
BORDER
ARTWORK
OVERLAY
HIGHLIGHT

[Kitjan]

wow, you're not kidding. I have a color picker for one of my textures, and reconfiguring the texture will sometimes cause it to change draw order. I was definitely not expecting this kind of non-determinism on the same draw layer.

[Rilgamon]

http://www.wowwiki.com/API_Frame_SetFrameLevel

[Kitjan]

Rilgamon, I'm talking about textures (from CreateTexture) all on the same frame, so SetFrameLevel does not apply. (Textures are not Frames)

[Saiket]

_NPCScan.Overlay relies on textures drawing in the order they're parented to a frame, although sometimes even that doesn't work and a few textures will appear out of order. I think fontstrings might be drawn in an entirely different pass judging by what you've posted, so there's no way to sandwich a fontstring between two textures on the same drawlayer.

I imagine the rendering order is something like this pseudocode:

for each Layer in Frame
    for each Texture in Layer
        draw Texture
    for each FontString in Layer -- Always overlaps same-layer textures
        draw FontString

[Kitjan]

I wonder if they draw in the same order as Frame:GetRegions() returns them? I wonder what draw operations on a Texture change the order of regions... I call a bunch of functions on the textures to set them up, presumably one of them has a chance to reorder them.

I was able to fix my issue by moving one of the textures to BORDER and doing a bit of texture coordinate math so the other two don't need to overlap any more.