Focus in Focus

[dickey]

Hello Forum,

What is the preferred way to focus on MobGUI native iOS controls, like the Text Field?

Thank you in advance.

Kind regards, Andrew

[pthirkell]

Maybe I'm missing the point here ... but just tap on the field? That brings focus and automatically reveals the keyboard.

[dickey]

Hello pthirkell,

Perhaps I should have said:

What is the preferred way to programmatically focus on MobGUI native iOS controls, like the Text Field?

I want the focus to be on a particular MobGui generated native iOS field when the card opens, so that the user is not forced to touch the field to attain focus.

I was not sure whether the regular focus command worked, or whether you send a touch to the field (which in fact is a group, and may need to be referenced in a different way), or whether from the release notes you use something like iphoneControlDo id, "focus" etc. Still not sure of the correct way, that's why I asked.

Kind regards, Andrew

[Dixie]

Andrew...

try

Code: Select all

focus on fld "whateverName"

be well

Dixie

[dickey]

Hello Dixie,

Thank you, for your reply. I did try your suggestion earlier - it does not work.

Recipe:
I create a new stack with MobGUI.
I navigate to the Native iOS controls (panel)
I drag on a native text field, and name it 'dixie'
I drag on a standard button, and edit it's script and create a on mouseUp handler:

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on mouseUp
   focus on field "dixie"
end mouseUp

When I run the stack in the IDE, and click on my button which is to give focus to the native text field, it bombs with the error:
button "Button": execution error at line 2 (Chunk: no such object) near "dixie", char 10.

Dixie, I suspected focus would not work in this manner as we are not dealing with LiveCode IDE fields. In the case of the MobGUI's native iOS text field, we are dealing with a group of objects.

Therefore, I suspect such groups of objects are probably referenced in another manner. I guess that is the heart of the question.

Kind regards, Andrew

[Dixie]

Andrew...

Apologies... Have a look at page 48 od the iOS release notes. You are able to set the 'enabled' property of the UITextField to true or false as in... iphoneControlSet idOrName, property, value

be well

Dixie

[dickey]

Thank you for your assistance Dixie,

The solution:
First in response to your comments Dixie:
iosUITextField is enabled by default when dragged onto a card from the MobGUI palette. Therefore there is no requirement to set the iosUITextField to enabled in your code. Should you wish to enable or disable your iosUITextField, you would do so as follows:

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global gInputA
iphoneControlDo gInputA["theNameOfYourIosUITextField"], "enabled", "true"

Back to the focus of the question, which was programmatically providing focus to a iosUITextField.

Simply:

Code: Select all

global gInputA
iphoneControlDo gInputA["theNameOfYourIosUITextField"], "focus"

The reason this did not work for me first time around, is that I experienced some form of corruption with my stack, that prevented the global gInputA from being updated by the creation of each new iosUITextField.

Thanks again, for your comments, and I hope someone else may benefit from this.

Kind regards, Andrew