| Allegro CL version 8.2 Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2. 8.1 version |
Arguments: dialog-item
Returns the value of the tab-position property of the argument.
If the tab key moves focus among controls on a dialog, this property indicates how many tabs are needed to get to this control. Tab position 0 means that control has focus when the dialog is displayed. Tab position 1 means pressing tab once moves focus to the control, and so on.
The setf of tab-position may be called to reposition a control that is already on a dialog. But unlike most properties of controls, it would have no effect to specify an initial tab-position when creating a control by passing a :tab-position keyword argument to make-instance. Instead, the initial tab order of the list of controls passed as the value of the dialog-items argument to make-window is determined by the order of the controls in that list. And the tab-position of a control added to a dialog by calling add-component is determined by the value of the behind argument to add-component.
In Windows, the tab-order of the controls on a parent window is always
the same as the front-to-back occlusion order of the controls. This
means, for example, that a group-box
or tab-control
must be positioned in
the tab order after all of the widgets that are on it, or else it will
cover those widgets. This is handled automatically when designing a
form window interactively, but it must be handled by the application
when creating a dialog programmatically.
(Note that keyboard shortcuts can be used to jump to a control with a
keypress. The keyboard shortcut is defined by placing a tilde (~)
before the keyboard shortcut letter. The keyboard shortcut is then
Alt-[the letter]. The static-text
control cannot
have focus so if its value has a tilde before a letter, that provides
a keyboard shortcut to the next control in the tab order. See the
discussion "Using a static text as a keyboard shortcut to jump to a
control" in the static-text
entry.)
The Form | Set Tab Order menu command can be used to set the tab position for all controls on a form.
Copyright (c) 1998-2016, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.
| Allegro CL version 8.2 Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2. 8.1 version |