Re: [Pythoncard-users] dialog form processing

[Alex T. <al...@tw...>]

Bryan Murdock wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I'm writing an app that will open up a CustomDialog asking the user to
>fill in a number of TextFields.  I'm trying to figure out a good
>design for validating the fields and prompting the user to try again
>if they left one blank, or entered something invalid.  It looks to me
>like it can only be done after the user clicks OK and I get the result
>back.  I'm having my Background create an alert dialog telling the
>user what they did wrong, and then go back and redisplay the dialog,
>which is kind OK, I guess.  Any suggestions for improvement?
>
>  
>
You can do it in the custom dialog function. This simple example will 
keep the dialog on-screen until it gets a satisfactory value for one of 
the fields (or the "Cancel" button is clicked).


from PythonCard import model, dialog

class MyDialog(model.CustomDialog):
    def __init__(self, parent, txt=''):
        model.CustomDialog.__init__(self, parent)

def myDialog(parent):
    dlg = MyDialog(parent)
    while True:
        result = dlg.showModal()
        if not result.accepted:
            #can always cancel
            break
        if dlg.components.TextField1.text == "Done":
            break

##    result.TextField1 = dlg.components.TextField1.text
##    result.TextField2 = dlg.components.TextField2.text
    result.texts = {}
    for name in ["TextField1", "TextField2"]:
        result.texts[name] = dlg.components[name].text
    dlg.destroy()
    return result


This keeps the dialog on-screen - but unfortunately it doesn't provide 
any helpful feedback to the user. I tried changing it to provide an 
alert box - and when you do that, the original dialog disappears while 
the new dialog is there. 

Changed section of code:

   while True:
        result = dlg.showModal()
        if not result.accepted:
            #can always cancel
            break
        if dlg.components.TextField1.text == "Done":
            break
        else:
           result = dialog.alertDialog(parent, 'Must set field 1 to 
"Done"', 'some title')

You could experiment with this - e.g. add a "status/error" component 
(static text) to the dialog, and try setting it rather than the alert 
dialog  - see if that allows you to give helpful feedback while avoiding 
the visual distraction of having the dialog disappear and reappear.

>Also, while we're on the subject of CustomDialogs, is there a nice way
>to copy the text from all TextField components of the CustomDialog
>into result, other than listing each one out, like so?
>
>result.FirstName = dlg.components.FirstNameTextField.text
>result.LastName = dlg.components.LastNameTextField.text
>etc.
>etc.
>
>  
>
you can do it using a dictionary as I did above (a dictionary called 
"texts" within the overall "result" dictionary). It makes it easy to get 
them into "result" - but it means that back in the background app where 
you invoked the dialog, you need to access them via the dictionary, as in

    def on_Button1_mouseClick(self, event):
        result = custDialog.myDialog(self)
        print result.texts["TextField1"]
        print result.texts["TextField2"]



-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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