How to get a list field to select what's typed
Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2019 8:36 pm
Here's a tip for others in the same boat, especially since I didn't find any other good premade examples from a Google search. (They probably exist, I just didn't find them from a cursory search. Hopefully this post will show up in a cursory search for others in the future. I did find one example in a cursory search, but it used a lot of code.)
Anyway, given some limitations of option menus, I decided to create a list field that would work like an option menu. The first task was moving the selection to whatever the user typed. I was amazed that I could get something that seemed to work with just 3 lines of code:
And then adding a timeout, to empty out the typedChars for the next use, or to allow the user to start typing over from scratch, takes only two extra lines:
But, as I said in another thread, before of false positives with lineoffset! If my field contains these two lines:
Chase Checking
Checks to Deposit
...then typing "che" will *not* go to the second line, since lineoffset matches the 2nd word of the 1st line.
So, as a complete solution, matching only the beginning of lines:
Anyway, given some limitations of option menus, I decided to create a list field that would work like an option menu. The first task was moving the selection to whatever the user typed. I was amazed that I could get something that seemed to work with just 3 lines of code:
Code: Select all
local typedChars
on keyup theKey
put theKey after typedChars
select line lineoffset(typedChars,me) of me
end keyupCode: Select all
local typedChars, timeout
on keyup theKey
if the seconds - timeout > 1 then put empty into typedChars
put theKey after typedChars
select line lineoffset(typedChars,me) of me
put the seconds into timeout
end keyupChase Checking
Checks to Deposit
...then typing "che" will *not* go to the second line, since lineoffset matches the 2nd word of the 1st line.
So, as a complete solution, matching only the beginning of lines:
Code: Select all
local typedChars, timeout
on keyup theKey
if the seconds - timeout > 1 then put empty into typedChars
put theKey after typedChars
lock screen -- greatly speeds things up on fields with lots of lines
repeat with x = 1 to the number of lines of me
if line x of me begins with typedChars then set the hilitedline of me to x
end repeat
put the seconds into timeout
end keyup