[Pythoncard-users] Find dialog layout and issues

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

I've put together a basic Find dialog layout. The resource description is
shown below and also attached as a file that you can view using the
resourceEditor sample. The final layout will probably be done with sizers if
possible in order to avoid display problems under Linux and Solaris.

I'm thinking about implementing this as a modal dialog and making it part of
the dialog.py module. So, usage would be something like:

    dlg = FindDialog(self, 'text to find', 0, 0)
    if dlg.accepted():
        ...

The last arguments would be for matching whole words only and matching case
and would default to 0 (false).

Should the dialog have an up/down direction searching option?

wxPython appears to be unable to display the selection in a field if the
window and field don't have focus, so I don't see any way of doing a normal
non-modal Find dialog at this time, since there would be no feedback to the
user that the selection has changed. I consider this a big limitation, so
I'll be lobbying over on wx-dev to have this fixed in wxWindows, so
eventually wxPython will work correctly.

Another issue is that if the dialog is made non-modal, then it would be
necessary to create the Find dialog in one method of the user code and
provide a method callback as part of the dialog argument list to be executed
when the user presses the Find Next button. An alternative solution would be
to let the Find dialog call framework find classes directly once they are
implemented.

Anyway, this is just a heads up for anyone interested in this part of the
framework. If you have some suggestions for the layout, how the dialog
should work, or anything else related to doing text searching in the
framework, let me know.

ka
---

{'stack':{'type':'Stack',
          'name':'Find',
          'title':'Find dialog',
          'position':(5, 5),
          'size':(370, 120),

    'backgrounds': [
    {'type':'Background',
         'file':'find.py',
         'classname':'Find',
         'name':'bgFind',
         'components': [

{'type':'StaticText',
    'name':'stcFindWhat',
    'position':(7, 10),
    'text':'Find What:',
    },

{'type':'TextField',
    'name':'fldFind',
    'position':(70, 7),
    'size':(195, -1),
    },

{'type':'Button',
    'name':'btnFindNext',
    'position':(280, 5),
    'label':'Find Next',
    },

{'type':'Button',
    'name':'btnCancel',
    'position':(280, 35),
    'label':'Cancel',
    },

{'type':'CheckBox',
    'name':'chkMatchWholeWordOnly',
    'position':(7, 35),
    'label':'Match whole word only',
    },

{'type':'CheckBox',
    'name':'chkMatchCase',
    'position':(7, 55),
    'label':'Match case',
    },

] # end components
} # end background
] # end backgrounds
} }