We’ve taken a look over the last few posts at some of the new features we’ve added to EditLine controls, but before we leave them we’ll mention a few miscellaneous new properties that you might find useful:

• AUTOSELECT
• CUEBANNER
• EXITCHARS
• VALIDCHARS

AUTOSELECT Property

This is a simple boolean property.  When set to TRUE all text in the control will be selected when the EditLine is given focus.

CUEBANNER Property

This is a string property that contains the text to display when an EditLine has no data.  The text is normally displayed in a faded style to differentiate it from “real” text.  It is intended primarily to give the user a simple hint on the purpose of the EditLine, or on the format of the data it should contain.

EXITCHARS property

This property allows you to specify one or more characters as “Exit” characters, which means that if a user types any of them into the control the focus is automatically moved to the next control in tab-order as though they had hit the Tab key. This property is a simple string containing the Exit characters.

// Move to the next control if the user enters a "." or a space
exitChars = ". "
call set_Property( @window : ".EDL_IP1", "EXITCHARS", exitChars )

Note this property does not work if the PASSWORDSTYLE property is TRUE.

VALIDCHARS Property

This property allows you to specify one or more characters that are “Valid” characters, which means that the user can only enter these characters into the control. This property is a simple string containing the characters that are allowed.

// Only allow numeric characters in EDL_NUMBER
validChars = "0123456789"
call set_Property( @window : ".EDL_NUMBER", "VALIDCHARS", validChars )

Note this property does not work if the EDITMASK property is set or the PASSWORDSTYLE property is TRUE.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).