highlighted fields

[Martin]

Hi, apologies for what I'm sure is a simple question, but, although I've tried searches, I'm not really sure what I should be searching for.

I'm moving an application from ver 4.5 to ver 6.00. In ver 4.5 I could modify a record, via a form, and tab from field to field. The first character of a field would be highlighted on entry to the field. In ver 6.00, the whole of the field is highlighted on entry. This may not seem like much of a problem, but often only the first character of the field needs to be changed; if any character is typed in, the whole (highlighted) string is deleted, whereas in ver 4.5 only the first character would be changed.

I hope this can be rectified by a global set up change, rather than have to trawl through hundreds of fields individually. Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Very many thanks,

Martin.
(It's Martin Wolff, but I seem to have created a new forum identity in my first name only.)

[Scott Emerick]

Martin,

You will find this setting in field rules->data entry->Position Cursor at, which is all the way on the bottom of the page.

I do not know a way of globally changing a field rule, but someone else might.

Scott

[Martin]

Thanks Scott, but the rules are the same as when it was running under ver. 4.5. The problem is not where the cursor is being placed in the field (it's at the start, as it was in the 4.5 version) but the fact that the entire field is highlighted, which seems to mean that any single key press deletes the existing data and overwrites it with that single character. It's exactly the same as if a section of text had been highlighted in, say, Word and then a key had been pressed. The highlighted text would be replaced by the key(s) pressed. This seems to happen throughout the application in ver. 6, although it didn't before. Someone else must have noticed this. Any more ideas gratefully received.

Thanks,

Martin.

[Bill Warner]

Scott has the right idea - if you change the cursor position to "Start of UNSELECTED text" (my emphasis), the cursor will be at the beginning of the value, which will NOT be selected. This means you can press DELETE to delete the first character, and then replace it.

I checked v4.5 - my character fields were completely selected, but fields with masks (i.e. phone numbers) and date fields did indeed select only the first character.

I think the new (default) method of selecting the entire text is appropriate for more situations than selecting just the first character. In my 13 years of developement, I've rarely seen a case where the user wanted to replace just the first character of a value.

[Martin]

Yes, thanks Bill, Scott was on the right track. Looks like I've got an exciting day or two modifying all the field rules! I'd hoped there was some global setting. In fact, has anyone suggested "global" field rules (maybe one set for each field type), which over-ride specific settings, for a future version?

Thank you both.

Martin Wolff.

[Martin]

for "which over-ride specific settings", read "which are over-ridden by individual settings".