Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
AppBuilder

Configuring a fill-in instance

You can change some basic characteristics of the fill-in widget’s appearance and behavior through its property sheet, if the default settings do not meet your needs.

To configure your fill-in object, begin by selecting it and choosing Tools Property Sheet. The dialog box opens:

Minimal configuration

Although you can accept many of the default settings, you should make at least three changes:

Change the AppBuilder-generated object identifier to one that more accurately reflects the role of this fill-in in your application.
Change the generic label to one that will be meaningful to the users of your application. Or, if appropriate, set the No Label check box to hide the label. Setting this check box does not clear the actual label text; the label string remains visible in the property sheet. The only other effect of setting or clearing this box is to alter the values in the Geometry section so that the fill-in stays at the same XY location within the enclosing frame.
Click the Advanced button and set the initial value, if any, that the fill-in is to display. By default, the initial value is empty/undefined.

Internal data format

You can use a fill-in to capture any data type whose value can be entered from the keyboard and represented on the display as ordinary text. The fill-in will do a limited amount of syntax-checking for you if you appropriately set the values for Define As and Format.

Define as — Choose the data type from the list. The default type is CHARACTER, but you can choose DATE, DECIMAL, INTEGER, LOGICAL, or RECID instead. RECID fields are internal record identifiers.
Format — Enter the formatting string for the data type you have chosen. If you would prefer to pick the format string from a list rather than enter it by hand, choose the Format button to open a dialog box specific to the type you have chosen. Shown here is the dialog that displays for type CHARACTER:

Help

You can supply helpful information to your users in several ways. Here are two of the most common:

Add a Tooltip string. Under MS-Windows, Tooltips display whenever the user allows the mouse cursor to hover for a few seconds over an object for which a Tooltip is defined.
Add a unique integer as the identifier for context-sensitive help, if you plan to provide such help as part of your application.

Geometry

Reflects the XY origin and size, in character units, of the fill-in. By default, the fill-in is colon-aligned. You can change that to left- or right-alignment, though the only noticeable effect that will have is to change the X origin value.

Miscellaneous properties (other settings)

These properties modify the widget’s appearance or behavior in various ways. You can change as many as you like:

Auto-resize — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes the object to automatically change its displayed size to agree with the current type size.
Auto-return — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes focus to move to the next object in the traversal list once this fill-in has accepted as many characters as it can.
Blank — Normally cleared. Setting this box prevents the fill-in from echoing input back to the display. This is useful for password fields and similar applications.
Deblank — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes the fill-in to automatically discard any leading blanks from input.
Disable auto-zap — Normally cleared. Setting this box prevents the fill-in from automatically clearing its input field whenever it gets the focus.
Display — Normally set. Clearing this box prevents the object from automatically showing the current value of the associated variable during initialization. To the user, the value would appear undefined.
Drop target — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes the fill-in to experience an event message whenever the user drops another object onto this one. You must write the appropriate event-handling code.
Enable — Normally set. Clearing this box makes the fill-in unresponsive to input.
Hidden — Normally cleared. Setting this box prevents the fill-in from responding to implicit requests to display itself. It will only honor explicit requests.
Native — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes the fill-in to vary its behavior according to the underlying platform (MS-Windows, for example) rather than behaving the same way regardless of platform.
No tab stop — Normally cleared. Setting this box removes this fill-in from the enclosing frame’s traversal list. Normally, pressing the key causes focus to move to the next object in the list. When this box is set, the fill-in can neither lose nor gain focus when the user presses the TAB key. If the widget has the focus, it will ignore the key, and if it does not, focus will cycle through the other members of the traversal list while ignoring this widget.
Caution: Making this fill-in Movable or Resizable (Advanced Properties) prevents this fill-in from gaining input focus using the mouse. So if you also set this property, you effectively prevent the widget from ever gaining input focus.
No undo — Normally set. Clearing this box causes the fill-in to journal all changes.
Read-only — Normally cleared. Setting this box prevents the user from changing the content of the fill-in.
Remove from layout — Cleared. Cannot be set unless defining an alternate layout.
Shared — Normally cleared. Setting this box makes the value of this fill-in available to other procedures.
View as text — Normally cleared. Setting this box causes the fill-in to display itself as though it were static text: read-only, and without any border or 3D effect.

Advanced properties

A fill-in widget has only the standard advanced properties, but you can change those that do not meet your needs. See the "Advanced properties" section for more information.