Including popup in tabbed sequence with fields

[dochawk]

I'm not sure I'm posting this at the right level--I'm attempting to reimplement a twenty year old SuperCard stack for a commercial project, so I'm an odd mix of expert and neophyte.

Anyway, I need to be able to include a popup type selection in the middle of the data entry fields on a card. This type, it's fields for first, middle, and last name, at which point gender would be implemented. I want the tab from lastname to take the user to a control that could either be selected by mouse OR by typing the first character of gender (e.g., male/female/joint), at which point another tab would run the script associated with that choice and deposit the cursor into address.

It looks like traversalon may have something to do with this. It also appears that I may be stomping on the mac human interface guidelines--but to the extent that they require a user to leave the keyboard for the mouse to make a routine selection, they're just plain wrong, and I don't care.

i suppose I could have both a field with an onexit and a popup that both can control a third field, but this is ugly.

What is the best way to achieve this?

thanks

hawk

[shaosean]

Look at the combo box control.. It acts as a cross between a field and popup.. You will need to do the scripting yourself to make it the way you want it to work (check out the Text Formatting pane of the Inspector to see it in use)

[dochawk]

That looks like it gets me partway there (and perhapss goes too far?)

For example, I want to be able to enter

Washington<tab>George<tab>m<tab>

to enter George Washington, a male, and have the choices strictly limited to m,f,j,c (male, female, joint, corporation). Other parts of the card vary depending upon the answer given here, as well as globals such as dhis (taking values of his,hers, their, its's) depending upon answer.

Or, in another case, there are about 30 choices that could be made, for which the user could either type a number (29<tab>) or the first few letters (ann for annuity).

I need to let users have access to the list of values without forcing their fingers from the keyboard (but still leaving the mouse for the less sophisticated).

Can I, perhaps, with "onSomething" pop up the selection list when someone tabs into the field/combobox, and onExit take the lexical "next" entry? (for that matter, if I can process on tab-out, this works, too).



The "can enter the (*^(&^* data without mousing around" is really go/nogo for this project . . .

thanks

hawk