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TextField Warning

Indicating invalid entries with a warning sign

Issue: 17.4 (July/August 2019)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,881
Starting Page Number: 24
Article Number: 17403
Resource File(s):

project174003.zip Updated: 2019-06-30 18:21:42

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

For my NumbersOnlyField articles I find myself in need of a TextField that flags when an entry is invalid. While it is easy enough to directly draw a warning sign on the window beside the TextField, that approach would lead to problems if the window has custom backgrounds, or the TextField is locked to the window and the window gets resized. Following that path quickly gets more complex and messy than it is worth. But Xojo provides a much easier and simpler way for us as we can use a TextField in a ContainerControl instead!

So what do we want to achieve? We want a TextField that draws a warning triangle when an entry is invalid (e.g. not a number), and a checkmark or something else when it is valid.

So first we make a custom class TextFieldWithDrawing with super TextField, and give it a property IsValidEntry as Boolean with the default value set to false (always choose the safe default option, because an empty field is not a numeric value anyway).

Note that it is better to use positive Booleans like IsValidEntry rather than negated Booleans like IsInvalidEntry. Why? Because it is more difficult to follow double negations like if IsInvalidEntry = False or if Not IsInvalidEntry... which is the same as if IsValidEntry = True or if IsValidEntry.

As the TextField needs to react to input, we add an event handler for TextChanged, and also create an identical event definition TextChanged in order to be able to propagate the event.

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