Automated tab order

General
1

I have read this article about tab order:
http://www.realsoftwareblog.com/2012/08/tab-order-change-in-real-studio-2012r1.html

It says this:
‘1) Most applications, including the Real Studio IDE, don’t have the tab order set properly. This is due to the fact that every time you add a control, the tab order must be set for that control and users (ourselves included) tend to forget to do that. This causes problems for end users and is very easy for a developer to miss.’

I made many many container controls and I almost garentee you will not go back to fix this manually through each one.

Is there a way I can get the tab order automatically set using an IDE script, build automation or something like that. I do not think it would be very efficient to perfrm this task at runtime and I will to set the superclass manually of a lot of controls I believe in order to do this.

So is there a way I can automate setting the tab order and also automate deletions of controls with a certain caption.

I want to loop through every window and container control and then loop through every control within them and have it automatically set the tab order based on the position (or something like that).

For the deletion of controls, I basically want to check the caption of every control a particular class and then delete if it has a particular caption.

Thanks

2

Two years later, just curious if somebody has made something for this particular problem and want to share / sell.

3

2016r3
top middle of the toolbar on a layout
“auto adjust tab order”

4

Thanks Norman. Since I am still on 2015R4.1 I was not aware

5

The “auto set tab order” was present for a bunch of releases, disappeared for a bit until we could rework it and has reappeared as of 2016r3
There’s a lot of useful stuff in the 2016 releases

6

Wow I am pleased to hear about this. I remember reading that people forget to set the tab order manually which apparently included Xojo developers. Now we have this feature, does that mean Xojo has fixed the tab order in their application?
'Most applications, including the Real Studio IDE, don’t have the tab order set properly. ’

Also, will this allow me to apply this to multiple controls at once or just single ones?

Thanks

7

How about Tab order for controls added at runtime? I can set them, and I can see their values, but across a matrix timeline control they don’t follow. E.g, tabindex 29 should move to 30, but it doesn’t. Instead skipping to 45 for some reason. Just curious if anyone has accomplished complex tab sequencing for arrays of controls added at runtime. -Best

8

The IDE inspector is such a beast - its got a lot of things added & adjusted at runtime
Unless things have changed there’s no auto adjusting of tab order when you add a control at runtime so if you want to insert one you have to manually renumber all the rest to maintain the order