Redrawing the control on top is not a possibility, since the TextField keeps moving to the top as long as the mouse is over it. After the mouse has left the TextField, redrawing the rectangle by changing visible indeed restores things back to normal.
As for the way control Zorder is managed, in VB it is a property of each control, and in C# a function that moves controls in the order. The end result being the same.
It would be nice to be able to layer controls in Xojo. Up to now, the rule has simply been, don’t do it. This issue and flicker make it almost impossible.
Instead of a rectangle, can you use a floating window? I’ve had reasonable success with that approach.
[quote=170215:@Tim Hare]It would be nice to be able to layer controls in Xojo. Up to now, the rule has simply been, don’t do it. This issue and flicker make it almost impossible.
Instead of a rectangle, can you use a floating window? I’ve had reasonable success with that approach.[/quote]
Actually, I have placed my rectangle inside a pagepanel, which allows me to display different content. The reason I do not use a window is because I am refactoring a desktop UI to the Modern UI look. It is far easier to simply move controls over a rectangle without changing a bit of the code, than to rewrite everything to make it work with a window. I have a lot of fields that interact between windows already.
As I mentioned, I got rid of the TextField issue by replacing it with a single line non styled TextArea.
Sliding the panel in is fine. No flicker. But sliding it out was terrible. So I simply remove it at once. It is not identical to the Metro way, but close enough. Those panes contain mainly settings the user will usually see once anyway.
Next app I create from scratch, I will use a window instead.
For dialog boxes and notification drawers (which look like Mac OS notifications but the slide at the bottom, right above the taskbar), I use plain box windows.
It is all coming along nicely. BevelButtons work fine for black framed buttons. I had to use a canvas for white buttons. I tried to use the system on screen keyboard for tablets, but it uses a super user mode so it launches fine from a shell, but then I found no way to close it. So I had to design my own virtual keyboard.
The only thing I am not going to deal this time around is rotation of the screen.
All in all, I believe that app will be real close to a native Metro app and offer real nice features on a tablet. Thanks in part to my experience with iOS. I should admit that as much as I loathed the Windows Metro interface when it came out, now that I use it on a tablet, I appreciate the design of that interface. As a matter of fact, desktop is barely usable with touch. Controls too small, not sensitive enough to touch (I often have to tap three or four times the Start menu), virtual keyboard that does not pop up automatically in desktop, and when it comes on the app does not know what to do with it…