Popups and dialogs..grrrrr

[tlyon]

I guess I must not be doing something right. Here I thought I would be able to use a popup form in place of ui-msg_box to gain some customization via XBasic. There is a major glitch, however. The ui method truly 'pops up' over all other windows, while the popup method pops up only over A5 windows. In my case, that isn't quite adequate, so it is back to ui_msg_box for me :(

Tom

[tlyon]

RE: Popups and dialogs..grrrrr

I'm too impatient. I think what's needed is a way to tickle the A5 window so that it wakes up and receives focus. I am currently trying minimizing the A5 window then restoring it before opening the popup window. That seems to force the form to receive focus, even if A5 is minimized. If you have another, cleaner way to achieve this same result, I would be interested in hearing of it. Otherwise, consider this thread solved.

[Tom Scholis]

RE: Popups and dialogs..grrrrr

Tom, I've experienced the same problems and devised two workarounds (neither of which I'm crazy about - but their fun to try).

1. Use a shareware screen capture program (with a temporary popup that has everything you want on it running over the same form that you want it to run over) to create a bitmap for a second form that looks like what you're trying to do. Use the bitmap as the form backdrop on a new form and place your fields accordingly(see Form Properties). So when you open the second form it looks like your first form with a dialog box except that everything is automatically disabled because, as I'm sure you realize, there looking at a bitmap.

2. Use "popup" and disable all of the the objects on the underlying form until you close the popup.

Hope this helps.

[tlyon]

RE: Popups and dialogs..grrrrr

sys_focus_put() solves the problem, doh.

I think I know what RTFM means now.

Ok, here is what I have so far:

Based upon some excellent input from Jake and others, I believe I will be able to use custom popup forms in place of ui_msg_box, enabling the use of XBasic in the popup form. This has some significance in this case, as I needed the popup to overlay anything else on the user's screen at the time, regardless of the window state of Alpha5.

I'll include a bit of the XBasic code I used from the calling form's OnTimer event:

if file.exists("serverpath!popup" + station.value + ".txt") then
  file.remove("serverpath!popup" + station.value + ".txt")
  :a5.restore()
  f = :form.load("callnotify", "Popup")
  f.activate()
  f.show()
  sys_focus_put()
  ' gives Alpha5 the focus by default
  f.close()
end if

Someone at Alpha5 has gone to a lot of bother to include all of these neat capabilities that I seem to keep discovering on a daily basis. Nice work!

Tom