Following on from our recent post on how to remove the row-selection from an EditTable we came across a related issue last week that we think you might like to know about.

Basically we designed a form with several EditTables, all row-select enabled, but during testing it became difficult to know where the actual input focus was as so many controls had a selection highlighted. We could have used the technique in the aforementioned blog post to clear the row-selection during the LOSTFOCUS event, but in this case we still needed to see which row was selected even though the focus was on another control.

The solution we used was to change the highlight color of the EditTable during the LOSTFOCUS event, toning it down to a lighter shade than normal. We then reset it during the GOTFOCUS event. This is actually quite easy to achieve with the COLOR_BY_POS message, the only real challenge is to devise an algorithm to fade the highlight color.

As usual we've saved you the trouble - here's small function that you can use as a starting point for your own application should you wish to use a similar technique:



In your EditTable LOSTFOCUS event you call this:




And to reset the colors in your EditTable GOTFOCUS event you call this:




(You'll notice that the function uses two "WinAPI" $insert records, both of which can be found the WinAPI Library that we recently posted.)

You can download a text version of edt_FadeSelection here.

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Labels: EditTable, EditTable Cookbook, OpenInsight