Tab Folder Focus

We recently encountered a problem with our generic menu routines. They are designed to figure out which object has focus at any given time and automatically act upon the object with focus. This allows our developers to place many datawindows on the same window and when the user clicks new row we know what to tell the business entity to create a new row for.

We discovered a problem where users would click twice on a tab folder tab thus setting focus to the tab folder. Then they would press new row and our automatic routine would not know which object to talk to the business entity about. Thus no new row appeared and the user was confused.

Thus we created a service which could be plugged into the tab folder object so that when the tab gets focus it figures out which control is the first control in the tab sequence and sets focus there. Note we Post the SetFocus function otherwise PowerBuilder messes up the redrawing of the tab object :-(.

This code has been modified so that it can be put in the tab control itself. It is also a good example of walking the tab folder control array.

// Set focus to the object with the lowest tab order
Integer li_Max, li_I, li_Order = 9999
DragObject ldo_Focus, ldo_Temp

IF UpperBound( this.Control ) < SelectedTab THEN RETURN
li_Max = UpperBound( this.Control[ SelectedTab ].Control )
FOR li_I = 1 TO li_Max
   ldo_Temp = this.Control[ selectedtab ].Control[ li_I ]
   IF ldo_Temp.taborder < li_Order AND ldo_Temp.taborder > 0 THEN
      li_Order = ldo_Temp.taborder
      ldo_Focus = ldo_Temp
   END IF
NEXT

IF IsValid( ldo_Focus ) THEN 
   // Post this otherwise PB gets a redraw problem
   // on the tab :(
   ldo_Focus.FUNCTION POST SetFocus()
END IF

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