On Mar 5, 2020, at 2:00 PM, Douglas von Roeder wrote: > I appreciate the suggestions and, like every one else here, I *have* gotten > into the habit of writing code to fill in the gaps in 4D’s feature set. In > this case, I’d like to avoid creating another widget though, Jody, to your > point, creating one UI that "does it all” would be a tidy solution. > > The grid in question is big (dozens of thousands of rows and just over 80 > columns) and I’ve got two data entry widgets - 4D dropdown > menus/hierarchical menus and a window that allows the user to create > multi-segment configuration strings. I’m not keen on introducing "yet > another" interface item but that might be my only option.
You could simulate a multi-select drop-down menu by creating a dynamic popup menu that has check marks next to each item that you select. But the UI would not be so great. User clicks, the popup menu is displayed, they select an item to set or remove the check mark next to it, the popup menu goes away, repeat. If you are usually only selecting one item at a time that might work. But if the user would like to click, select 2 or more items and then have the popup menu go away then you are going to have to open a window with a widget in that window and have an “OK” button or a window close box. Then the user can select as many items in the list as they want and then make the window go away and save their selections. I would use window type “Pop up form window” and put a listbox edge-to-edge in that window with an OK button at the bottom of the window. When you open a window like and use the DIALOG command it will automatically close the window and disappear if the user clicks outside of the window bounds. "Pop up form window” also has no window boarders. User knows when they see the OK button that when they click it changes are saved. So the UI would be: - user clicks a cell - the Pop up form window appears with a listbox inside with 2 columns: checkbox and description and OK button at the bottom - user clicks checkboxes, scrolls the listbox if necessary and when done clicks the OK button - or if the user is just wanting to look at the currently selected items, they can click the OK button, or just click anywhere outside the window and the widget disappears. All your logic to save selections is inside the OK button. And if you want, you can turn off all the lines and borders for the list box and with no scrollbars and no OK button it looks like just a stack of checkboxes the user can turn on or off. All save logic is stored in the checkbox column method of the listbox. When user clicks somewhere else on the form the widget disappears. Each time they click a checkbox you save that change. It’s a modal dialog box that isn’t really modal. No OK, Cancel or window close box. You’ll know its actually a window, but the users probably won’t. You wanted suggestions… 😀 Tim ***************************************** Tim Nevels Innovative Solutions 785-749-3444 [email protected] ***************************************** ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: https://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
