Each segment, whether retained or nonretained, has a number of characteristics, called attributes that you can set in accordance with your application's requirements. The attributes of a segment are quite different from those of a graphics primitive in that segment attributes have ON and OFF settings. There are seven segment attributes. However, only two are described in this chapter: chained (ATTR_CHAINED) and fast-chained (ATTR_FASTCHAIN).
When an application creates a segment in a presentation space, the operating system assigns initial attributes to it. By default, five of the attributes will be set ON and two will be set OFF. The chained and fast-chained attributes are set ON. Your application can alter these values using GpiSetInitialSegmentAttrs or retrieve the values of the current initial attributes using GpiQueryInitialSegmentAttrs.
The chain attribute tells the operating system to add each new segment in your application's presentation space to the segment chain. The fast-chained attribute tells the operating system to prevent the resetting of the primitive attributes to their default values before drawing the segment chain.