User input controls (such as TextFields, TextAreas, PopupMenus, Combo Boxes, etc…) almost always require a Label to inform the user as to what should be entered into the control. These Labels are almost always positioned to the immediate left of the control. I would like to suggest that user input controls should have Captions instead of requiring the developer to create a Label for each one. The navigator menu in the IDE can get quickly cluttered with meaningless controls (such as Label1, Label2, Label3, etc ) and the creation and positioning of each one is needlessly time consuming and messy. Having the IDE offer the option of automatically positioning a caption (like it does with CheckBoxes) would be ideal. (If only we could control the positioning of the CheckBox caption from right to left.)
I was thinking about submitting this as feedback but I thought I’d run it past the folks here to see if anyone else agrees or if, perhaps, I missed something obvious.
or you can quickly make your own using a container control
i’ve even got a blog post about doing this on my blog that is set to publish tomorrow morning
i’d post a link but its frowned on
you can get there by clicking on my profile though
FWIW, I make the labels I’m not going to modify into a control set, so the navigator doesn’t get cluttered. It wouldn’t hurt to submit a feature request, though.
I’ve been creating these with Container controls, as Norm suggests. What’s great is that I can control the position when resizing depending on how I lock the controls inside the container. Also allows for easy hiding and showing of the control with it’s label.
I set Labels above (sometimes below) the TextArea and TextFields. On countries where the script is different than ours (writing from right to left, top to bottom / bottom to top), the situation can be different (but here, I only suppose, but IMHO, it looks like this can be).
Also, unless you add hundreds of controls on a window (there can be situations), this do not takes so much time. I usually drop one from the Label pane, then Option-Drag as many times as I need to cover my needs.
What takes time is to change the Label1 LabelX to something more precise (L_Name_Family for example).
What would help is the ability to lock on the window a set of Controls, so when you have to move them, you only have to move one (no need to select the whole lot with Shift-Click).
But this is a different story.
[quote=472035:@Kristin Green]User input controls (such as TextFields, TextAreas, PopupMenus, Combo Boxes, etc…) almost always require a Label to inform the user as to what should be entered into the control. These Labels are almost always positioned to the immediate left of the control. I would like to suggest that user input controls should have Captions instead of requiring the developer to create a Label for each one. The navigator menu in the IDE can get quickly cluttered with meaningless controls (such as Label1, Label2, Label3, etc ) and the creation and positioning of each one is needlessly time consuming and messy. Having the IDE offer the option of automatically positioning a caption (like it does with CheckBoxes) would be ideal. (If only we could control the positioning of the CheckBox caption from right to left.)
I was thinking about submitting this as feedback but I thought I’d run it past the folks here to see if anyone else agrees or if, perhaps, I missed something obvious.[/quote]
We already have a case for this.
how about Container controls templates we can add from the library view?
or a dialog to create a “label textfield button” Container control
or a context menu at mouse cursor in form add “label textbox” here.
or a gui wizard add 10x label and textbox
or drop with shift key and it ask how many controls
or a better duplicate menu. as example duplicate … “duplicate 10x vertical”
I also wonder about the meaning of this. Should I still create the feature request in the Feedback system or are you saying there is no point because it’s already on the roadmap?
it is on the big wishlist of all users and each can assign his 5 priorities.
a saying that applies: You can’t have everything.
i think its not forbidden to make your own feature request in this feedback tool.
That is the problem. The UI depends a LOT of the designer and/or the client, there is not a “rule” of whre a label must be.
So, you will end with a control made for a specific target and not really desirable for a big part of the comunity. (Like making web controls mac themed, even when OS web usage has 7% of the marketshare)
It is better if xojo provides more reliable “single” controls and each one of us make custom ones in container controls acordingly with our personal UI standars.
I have some custom controls, with aditional functionality like error providers, tooltip icons, character counts, search, etc.
As well as alignment. Labels “on the left” are sometimes left-aligned, sometimes right-aligned.
And then there’s the whole Font Settings (Bold, Color, …) E.g. when validating input, you might want to indicate what’s missing/wrong/…
So to me this seems to be a lot of duplicated functionality of a “Label”. I don’t know if I want that added to all Controls. Or if I prefer to keep the Label seperate. It doesn’t matter much to me, as we can do all that already with little work. There’s much more in Feedback that isn’t possible at all yet, which would help the built applications to be better and more up-to-date.
That Control-Captions-idea is nice from a Developers view (maybe a bit less of layouting-work), but I don’t see much benefit for the built products. That’s why it’s ranked very low on my list.
thinking a step forward i like the way ms powerapps generating the gui for a database dataset.
i believe it was called dataview and dataedit.
it is a little bit of configuration and the input ui is generated.
especially if you have a lot of fields it is a big help and save much time.
