🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bt05Mv.Mt8@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> jeffo@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (J.B.  
Nicholson-Owens) writes:
> One small PopUp problem I haven't seen addressed is having a lot of
> entries in a PopUp or PopDown (whatever those downward expanding PopUp
> menus are called).  There needs to be something that is able to,
> perhaps, scroll the choices up and down the way Mac pull-down menus do
> when the menu is too long to display on the screen.
> 
> Has anything been done in 3.0 to handle this situation?
> 
> I wish that merely using a scrollView were a suitable replacement for
> such problems, but the ability of the PopUp to give an infinite number
> of choices as well as show the chosen one in a very small space and
> almost instantly is *very* handy.  I would hate to have to revert to a
> button bringing up a panel that had a scrollView in it.  That would
> seem so cumbersome to me as a user.

We actually wrote a subclass of TextField called LookupField which solves  
this problem. The LookupField owns a ButtonCell which displays its label  
(non-bordered, so it appears to be a plain old static TextField). When you  
click on the ButtonCell region, a LookupPanel pops up with all acceptable  
values contained in a scrolling Matrix. Just like a PopUpList, this panel  
runs modal until you make a selection or cancel the operation. Our users  
don't find it cumbersome, perhaps because it is well integrated with the  
TextField: The same panel pops up automatically to validate data entry  
directly into the field.

The lookup table values are stored in a group of flat files and attached  
to the LookupField by name. That means you don't need to access the NIB  
file to change the contents of the table, as you would with PopUpLists. It  
also allows lookup tables to be built in-memory on the fly, for non-static  
data. (Yes, I know you can do both of these things with programmatic  
PopUps, but it's a lot more work.) A very convenient and intuitive  
alternative to PopUpLists, which we no longer use.

--
Gregory H. Anderson          | "We're very tolerant around here,
Benevolent Dictator-for-Life |  being only amateurs ourselves."
Anderson Financial Systems   | - Tortoise (Godel, Escher, Bach)
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