OpenField mystery

[Peter M. Brigham]

On Aug 23, 2014, at 3:31 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> On 8/23/2014, 12:14 PM, Graham Samuel wrote:
>> I have a palette with a lot of objects on it. There are some fields
>> and some buttons. I have just realised that when I click on one of
>> the buttons, before executing the 'mouseUp' handler for the button,
>> the engine fires an 'openField' for one of the fields. I can't see
>> what I have done to cause this, but it's causing chaos! Happens in
>> the IDE and the corresponding standalone.
> 
> You may have hit the common problem where the engine selects the text of the first field that has traversalOn set to true when the stack gains focus. It's annoying as hell. The fix is to turn off traversalOn and then after opening/resuming, turn it back on again. If you do that, you have to turn it off for all editable fields, because the engine will just select the next one instead if you don't.
> 
> Easier would be to try a resumeStack handler that calls another handler to "focus on nothing" in half a second or so, after the engine is done interfering.
> 
> I wish there was a way to turn off this default behavior because there are as many times you don't want it as when you do. Windows/Linux users can get around it pretty easily by making sure a button is the lowest layered object on the card; on those systems, buttons can be traversed and it isn't a big deal if the button has an outline. That doesn't work on Macs, where buttons don't use that property and the engine skips right to a field.
> 
> And just to cover all bases, another really ugly way around it is to make an editable field at layer 1 and place it offscreen where you can't see that it's selected. That can interfere with the tabbing order though, because the user can't see where the cursor went when it gets to that field. I usually do the "focus on nothing" business, but if you do use an offscreen field you don't need to change any scripts.

I have long been annoyed at the default placement of the insertion point in the first field when the card is opened (I believe it's not just when the stack gains focus). My solution is to group all the fields and set the traversalon of the group to false. This doesn't interfere with the editability of any individual field, but it solves the problem of this annoyance.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig