| Usage / Programming with DIALOG | |
When a dialog is executing, the end-user can jump from field to field with the keyboard by using the Tab and Shift-Tab keys. The order in which the fields can be visited with the Tab key can be controlled with a form field attribute. The end user can tab out of an INPUT ARRAY sub-dialog with Ctrl-Tab and Shift-Ctrl-Tab accelerators (in INPUT ARRAY, Tab and Shift-Tab loop in the fields of the current row).
The FIELD ORDER dialog attribute defines the way tabbing order works. Tabbing order can be based on the dialog binding list (FIELD ORDER CONSTRAINED, the default) or it can be based on the form tabbing order (FIELD ORDER FORM). It is recommended that you use the FIELD ORDER FORM option, to use the tabbing order specified in the form file.
The TABINDEX field attribute allows tabbing order in the form to be defined for each form item. By default, the form compiler assigns a tabbing index for each form item according to the position of the item in the layout.
Form elements that can get the focus are:
If you use the keyboard to tab into a form element, the focus will go to the next (or previous) element that is visible and activated . In other words, if a form item is hidden or disabled, it is removed from the tabbing list.
The tabbing position of a read-only list driven by a DISPLAY ARRAYbinding is defined by the TABINDEX of the first field .
The NEXT FIELD instruction can also use the tabbing order, when executing NEXT FIELD NEXT and NEXT FIELD PREVIOUS.
If the form uses a TABLE container, the front-end resets the tab indexes when the user moves columns around. This way, the visual column order always corresponds to the input tabbing order. If the order of the columns in an editable list shouldn't be changed, you can freeze the table columns with the UNMOVABLECOLUMNS attribute.