userRED3@ualtamts.BITNET (Steve Wart) (08/02/89)
I've been having some difficulty lately with modeless
dialogs containing more than a few editable text items. The
problem is largely due to the fact that the default update
routine for these items draws a border with a 3 pixel offset
around the item's rectangle. I don't want this offset; it
makes the edit fields too small. (I'm using a 9 point font
and only digital characters, so I'm not too concerned about
them not fitting within the borders.)
My solution has been to bypass IsDialogEvent and DialogSelect
completely, handling the keyboard and mouse events myself.
This has led to certain problems. I wrote a routine called
"UseTextItem" (see below) which is called whenever someone
clicks the mouse in a text field other than the current one.
This routine seems to alter the text in the dialog's item list.
There must be simple reason that it's messing things up, but
I'm blind to it.
I was originally calling it when a keyboard event indicated
that a new field was to be hilighted (e.g. when the tab key was
pressed, I would call UseTextItem(theDialog, editField + 2).
Note that DialogPeek(theDialog)^.editField refers to the item
number of the text field minus one), but I discovered that all
I had to do was call SelIText(theDialog, editField + 2, 0, 32767).
This works well when I want the entire field to be hilighted, but
I'm not sure what I should do to handle mouse events (i.e. double
clicks, etc.).
There are other solutions. I could avoid dialogs altogether
and keep 35 textedit fields, but that doesn't solve the other
problem I'm having; namely aligning the text items in the
little boxes. When I get an update event, I draw all the inactive
fields with DrawString and they look swell. The active field
however, is always a few pixels off.
As usual, any comments, suggestions or explanations are welcome.
procedure UseTextItem( dialog : DialogPtr; itemNum : Integer );
{
Set the dialog's text edit field to itemNum.
ItemNum should reference a editable text field.
}
var
box : Rect;
itemType : Integer;
item : Handle;
text : Str255;
begin
SetPort(dialog);
GetDItem(dialog, itemNum, itemType, item, box);
with DialogPeek(dialog)^, DialogPeek(dialog)^.textH^^ do begin
if editField = itemNum - 1 then
exit(UseTextItem);
HLock(Handle(textH));
TEDeactivate(textH); { remove hilighting, caret }
GetIText(item, text);
viewRect := box;
with box do { attempt to align text properly }
SetRect(destRect, left, top - 1, right - 1, bottom);
editField := itemNum - 1;
TESetText(item^, Length(text), textH);
InvalRect(viewRect);
TEActivate(textH);
HUnlock(Handle(textH))
end
end { of UseTextItem };
You can attempt to reach me at the following address:
steve_wart@ualtamts.BITNET