Need Help with Detecting Focus Loss within Panel

[MeInMaui]

Hi guys,

I hope someone can help me.

I have a number of item widgets (buttons) within a panel widget. I would like to perform actions on panel in the event that

1.) Any widget with the panel gains focus
2.) Focus is lost for all widgets in the panel (e.i. focus has shifted outside of the panel)

The first case is easy and is working without problems. The second case is giving me fits. The problem is that when focus shifts from one item widget to the next within the panel, there is a brief window when neither have focus. This causes my attempts to detect loss of focus within the panel to have intermittent false-positives. This is causing very erratic behavior.

It would be nice if the FocusGained and FocusLost hooks could be applied to panel widgets such that FocusGained is triggered if any focusable widget within the panel gains focus and FocusLost is triggered if all focusable widgets within the panel have lost focus.

In the absence of this, are there any ideas on how I might reliably detect when focus is no longer present in any of the elements within a panel?

Thanks.

Aloha,
Mike

[Opus4]

Just a quick comment that might show I haven't thought about it long...

The easiest way is to have the FocusGained hook used on widgets outside the panel. But, it sounds like that isn't an option, unless you have something covering the rest of the screen that you can check for focus.

If you say there is a short delay when focus is lost before focus is gained on another element, perhaps it could work to use a delay in the FocusLost hook before seeing what has focus now. You could probably check GetFocusContext after the FocusLost delay too.

- Andy

[MeInMaui]

Thanks Andy,

I thought of the same thing yesterday. Unfortunately this requires hooks in every focusable object to start new threads and run short timers. I couldn't get it to work. But to be honest, I didn't try very hard because the solution felt inelegant and unsatisfying, especially when dealing with many objects. If this turns out to be to only viable approach, I'll try it again. Thanks again for your help.

Aloha,
Mike

[Opus4]

You would need a FocusLost hook for each item in the panel, but they could all be references to the same code. The timer part is pretty easy -- just call Wait(a little while) & then continue your check to see if anything in the panel still has focus. Is that what you tried? This method would use a variable local to the overall panel that items could modify via FocusGained, or GetFocusContext() could be used to see if some variable defined under the panel exists & has your value.

Actually, you might be able to just use GetFocusContext() on its own to update some invisible UI area & have its child UI widget chain initiate the settings that would tell the panel that nothing in it has focus -- it could set a status variable & then call RefreshArea() for your panel, whose LayoutStarted hook or whatever could deal with focus being gone. Not sure if that is really the best thing to do, though. Maybe someone else will have a better idea...

- Andy

[GKusnick]

Putting a hook on every item in your panel shouldn't be too onerous if you use themes to abstract the common code.

On the other hand it seems like there ought to be a way to solve this with a single thread forked off from AfterMenuLoad or some similar point. This thread would wake up every 100 ms (say) and check to see who has the focus. If the focus is outside the panel twice in a row, fire off your "panel lost focus" code.

[MeInMaui]

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I'll try playing with these ideas and see what happens.

Aloha,
Mike

[MeInMaui]

So I got this working fairly well, but now I have another issue that has cropped up:

I'd like to place my toolbar in the menu theme that is already used by all of the menus in SageMC, so that the toolbar is always available. My problem is that when I do this, the toolbar always ends up being drawn beneath other UI elements. I don't see any way to force the toolbar to always be on top. It seems the only option I have is to place a reference to the toolbar in every menu and this poses difficulties whenever new screens are added as well as just being a general PITA to set up in an import.

Is there any additional control to the display order of UI elements besides the order they are listed in the widget chain? How do elements in a theme actually fit into the heirarchy? It seems that widgets contained in a theme are always drawn first.

Thanks for listening to yet another ramble.

Aloha,
Mike