I would like to have a text box and a button in my GUI. When the button is pressed, a history window will come up, and if the user selects a previous entry the text that they have highlighted in the edit box will be overwritten.
It should work like copy-pasting, whatever is selected in the history window should be pasted over what is selected, or the new text should be added wherever the cursor is.
Is there any way in Matlab to do this? Is it possible to access what is highlighted in an edit box?
With vanilla Matlab this isn't possible. It appear that Mathworks is in the process of expanding what they support with GUIs (survey 1, survey 2), but as of yet they don't allow this.
One possible workaround is using findjobj.m, by Yair Altman. He discusses edit boxes in this post
You can trace findjobj.m for your text box to find 1 or 2 lines of code that are needed so you don't have to carry around all 3,400 lines of it.
Then all you really need to do is get the selected indices and work from there.
javaHandle = findjobj(editBoxHandle);
startSelect = get(javaHandle,'SelectionStart');
endSelect = get(javaHandle,'SelectionEnd');
Once you have the indexes of what text is selected, it becomes almost trivial to replace that text with the new text.
text = editBoxHandle.String;
editBoxHandle.String = [text(1:startSelect) newText text(endSelect:end)];
One thing to note, when the user clicks the button the text box will lose focus, and it will no longer be clear what text is selected. You can remedy this by giving focus back to the text box, and re-selecting what was selected in the button's callback.
uicontrol(editBoxHandle); %Give focus to the edit box, selecting the entire text
javaHandle.select(startSelect,endSelect); %select/highlight the correct stuff
This will highlight the text that will be replaced with the users selection
Related
I have the following requirement (sorry, but I'm quite new to JavaFX).
I need to have a custom TextArea that supports not only entering text but also entering a kind of macro.
This Macro has a unique ID and an associated text. The text should be displayed in the TextArea but with an e.g. light grey background. This is because it should behave as a unit.
You should not be able to click inside the macro and add a char there. The cursor should be placed behind the macro. And is you press just backspace the complete macro should be deleted.
If you call something like getRawContent() of the custom TextArea you should get a placeholder for the macro and not the associated text like:
getRawContent()
==> "This is text part one MACRO:132 This is text part two"
If the macro 132 has the following text associated "XXX123XXX", you will see inside the custom TextArea:
This is text part oneXXX123XXXThis is text part two"
But the text XXX123XXX has a light grey background to show that this text is associated with a macro and could be deleted, copied, and so on as a whole unit. Could be italic as well as in the above line. Should be only a bit different to the generic text.
Could someone assist me?
My Custom Control works now. I used an Eventfilter to prevent the internal Eventhandler to process the keypressed events in order to set the caret position behind a macro or delete the complete macro when DEL or BACKSPACE is pressed, this works.
And I use a Mouselistener to prevent that someone clicks and set caret position inside a macro.
So now I have only the problem left to mark the text somehow that the user can see what is normal text and what macro content.
Maybe I close here and open a new question.
I have a table cell of fixed large size, and in it is nothing but a Plain Text Content Control, whose default placeholder text "Click here to enter text" takes up only a small portion of that table cell.
The problem is that if the user clicks anywhere in the cell but outside of the control's placeholder text, then starts typing, the entered text will not be part of the control and will not be subject to the control's style or any other control properties.
So - other than adding a lot of dummy characters to the placeholder text, which doesn't seem to be predictable in its word-wrap behavior, is there a way to make the control's placeholder text (or, in general, its click-boundary) fill the entire table cell?
UPDATE actually there were some carriage returns after the control that I was not aware of; after deleting those, clicking anywhere in the cell as long as the x coordinate if the click is greater than or equal to the leftmost x coordinate of the control will edit the control text value as desired. If you click leftward of the control, you will end up editing whatever fixed text exists to the left of the control, i.e. a fixed text label. Still strange. The workaround here was to split cells for all multi line text entry areas, such that the label is on its own cell, and the control is now at the leftmost edge of its cell.
Content controls do not support something like expanding to the surrounding container. They will always use only the space that is required to render their content.
If you want to prevent users from clicking and typing text outside of the control, you could use the following approach:
Put a rich text content control around your table/table row/cell
Put the plain text content control as a nested content control in the table cell (the plain text content control must be non-vanishing for this to work)
Make the outer content control read-only
Now the only thing the user is allowed to edit is the inner plain text content control. The downside of this approach is that your document now contains areas that are locked. This has an impact on usability, first, because, it may not be obvious to the user why certain areas cannot be modified, and second, because a lot of standard actions do no longer work if part of the selection is locked (e.g. Select All > Update ToC).
I am developing an OpenOffice Writer template that can be used to fill in reports for a child-care centre.
There are some standard outcomes, comprising long sentences, and I want the user to be able to select the appropriate sentence from a combo box. I have entered the sentences into a table in Openoffice Base database, which is then connected to a series of combo boxes in a Writer template. However, when the user choose an option that contains a very long sentence, only the text up to the length of the combo box is visible.
What I want to do is have the selected value of the combo-box wrap over several lines when selected so that all the (very long) text appears in the selected box when the user chooses a long sentence from the combo.
I have been looking through the properties of the combo box control, but have yet to identify one that will allow the selected value in the combo box to word-wrap (so that I could make the combo-box several lines in height such that the entire sentence would fit into the box).
Any pointers on how I could do this would be much appreciated.
thanks,
David.
Thanks Jim K, that was helpful. In the end, what I wound up doing was creating a textbox which I named "selectedOutcomeATextBox" immediately below my combo box which was named "OutcomeCombo".
I then attached the following macro code to the textModified event associated with the "selectedOutcomeATextBox":
Sub UpdateOutcomeA
Dim Doc As Object
Dim Form As Object
Dim Ctl As Object
Dim newCtl as Object
Doc = ThisComponent
Form = Doc.DrawPage.Forms.GetByIndex(0)
Ctl = Form.getByName("OutcomeCombo")
newCtl = Form.getByName("selectedOutcomeATextBox")
newCtl.Text = Ctl.Text
End Sub
I also set the "Printable" property of the "OutcomeCombo" to "No", so that when the document prints, the combo box itself does not appear on the printed page, but the "selectedOutcomeATextBox" textbox which has had its value set by the macro when I choose a value from the combo box does appear with the desired text. I also set the "TextType" property of the selectedOutcomeATextBox" text box to "Multi-Line", so that extra long text will wrap to the next line, thereby showing the very long strings that are stored there.
Thanks heaps Jim K.
cheers,
David Buddrige
Apparently combo boxes do not have the MultiLine attribute. The question was asked a few years ago here but was not solved.
One alternative that requires some macro programming is to use a single multi-line text field and then make a scroll bar button that changes the choice. Instead of a scroll bar, two buttons could be used to change the choice (Previous / Next), or even a list box control. Using a list box control in this way would have the advantage that they could see all the choices at once, like a combo box.
Another approach is to break up each sentence and display the parts across several lines of a list box. Then when one line is clicked, all the lines of a sentence are selected at once, using an event listener for the list box. This could be shown in addition to an ordinary editable multi-line text box, in case none of the answers in the list are wanted.
One more idea: Radio buttons can have multiple lines, so dynamically show radio buttons, one for each sentence. A dialog window could be displayed to hold the radio buttons. The result of the dialog would be used to fill the multi-line text field.
Or you could just live with the truncated sentences. Maybe it would help to make the control a little wider, or abbreviate the sentences.
I think it should be pretty simple what I want to do, basically I have one edit box that displays a value in percentages and another that I want to update to display raw values. I've tried using the following code under the edit1 (percent) callback:
currentKey = str2num(get(gcf,'CurrentKey'));
percent = str2num(get(handles.edit1,'String'));
if ~isnan(currentKey) && ~isnan(percent) && 0<=percent && percent<=100
set(handles.edit2,'String',num2str(2*percent))
end
But it will only update the second edit box if I first click outside of the first one. Anyone have an idea of what I should be doing?
Thanks!
I think this link should help you:
How can I make the text that I enter into an edit text box update dynamically?
Solution:
This enhancement has been incorporated in Release 2011a (R2011a). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:
This is expected behavior of the Edit Box UICONTROL in MATLAB.
You can try using the 'keypressfcn' to grab the keyboard input. The attached two files demonstrate the ability of real-time text update. As you enter text into the upper edit box, the text will be copied to the edit box beneath it as you enter.
Please download the following two files:
test_keypressfcn.m
test_keypressfcn.fig
Execute the program.
A GUI will appear. Enter text in the upper edit box displayed in the GUI.
Observe the text in the lower editbox is updated dynamically or in real-time as you enter test in the upper edit box.
Please note that this will work only for text that is continuously entered in the editbox. If you type in between words already entered in the editbox the gui will not perform as expected. You will need to implement logic similar to the one in this example to get the behavior that you desire.
I have an mdb file made by ms access. It got a form inside and inside the form there are one large textbox.
The intention of making this textbox is to show the progress of some work by adding messages inside the textbox:
txtStatus.value = txtStatus.value & "Doing something..." & vbCrLf
txtStatus.value = txtStatus.value & "Done." & vbCrLf
But the problem is, when the height of the text > height of the textbox, the new message is not displayed automatically. The textbox has a scroll bar, but I have to scroll it manually. I would like to auto scroll to the bottom whenever new text pop up.
I tried to add this code(copied from internet) in the On Change property, but the code failed, it does nothing:
Private Sub txtStatus_Change()
txtStatus.SelStart = Len(txt) - 1
End Sub
I wish there would be some simple and beautiful way to achieve this. I don't want to add some code which only work on some computers due to its dependence on the windows platform's kernel/etc.
You can do it via a call to a sub;
AppendText "Bla de bla bla."
.
.
sub AppendText(strText As String)
with txtStatus
.setfocus '//required
.value = .value & strText & vbNewLine
.selstart = len(.Value)
end with
end sub
There is a workaround to the design flaw mentioned by steve lewy in his comment on the original post. It is possible to have a text box that appears to do both of the following:
When the contents are too large for the box, and the box does not
have the focus, the box displays the last part of its contents,
rather than the first part of it.
When the box has the focus, it can scroll to any part of the text,
but it initially shows only the last part of the text, with the
cursor at the end of the text.
This is accomplished by actually having two identically-sized, overlaid text boxes, where one is visible only when the focus is elsewhere, while the other is visible only when it has the focus.
Here’s an example of how to do it in Access 2010.
Create a new Access database, and create a memo field named LongNote in its only table. Fill LongNote with some examples of long text. Create a form for editing that table.
Create a text box called BackBox with the desired size and font, too small to completely show a typical value of its data source, LongNote. (Instead of creating this box, you can rename the default text box created on the form.)
Make an exact copy of that box called FrontBox. Set the data source of FrontBox to be either the entire contents of BackBox or the last part of the contents, as shown below. The size of the last part, measured in characters, depends on the size of the box and its font, as well as on the kind of text to be displayed. It needs to be chosen by trial and error to reliably allow that many characters to be displayed in the box. For instance, here’s the formula for a box that can reasonably hold only 250 characters:
=iif(Len([BackBox])>=250,"... " & Right([BackBox],246),[BackBox])
If the whole value is too large to be shown, three dots precede the part that is shown to indicate that it’s incomplete.
Create another text box called OtherBox, just to have somewhere you can click besides the two boxes already mentioned, so neither of them has the focus. Also create a tiny (0.0097 x 0.0097) text box called FocusTrap, which is used to avoid selecting the entire contents of whatever text box gets the focus when the form is displayed (because text selected that way is hard to read).
Enter the following event-handling VBA code:
' Prevent all text boxes from being focused when a new record becomes
' current, because the focus will select the whole text and make it ugly
Private Sub Form_Current()
FocusTrap.SetFocus
End Sub
Private Sub Form_Open(Cancel As Integer)
FocusTrap.SetFocus
End Sub
' When FrontBox receives focus, switch the focus to BackBox,
' which can display the entire text
Private Sub FrontBox_GotFocus()
BackBox.SetFocus
FrontBox.Visible = False
End Sub
' When BackBox receives the focus, set the selection to
' the end of the text
Private Sub BackBox_GotFocus()
BackBox.SelStart = Len([LongNote])
BackBox.SelLength = 0
End Sub
' When BackBox loses focus, re-display FrontBox – if the text in
' BackBox has changed, then FrontBox will follow the change
Private Sub BackBox_LostFocus()
FrontBox.Visible = True
End Sub
Test the form. When you click on FrontBox, it should disappear, letting you work on BackBox. When you click in OtherBox to remove the focus from BackBox, FrontBox should reappear. Any edits made in BackBox should be reflected in FrontBox.
Back in design mode, move FrontBox so it exactly covers BackBox, and click Position | Bring to Front to ensure that it covers BackBox. Now test the form again. It should appear that a single text box switches between display-the-last-few-lines mode and edit-the-entire-contents mode.
Simply put the following code after linefeed or on Change event txtStatus
txtStatus.SelStart = Len(txtStatus) - 1