OpenField mystery

[J. Landman Gay]

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.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com