Generic FunctionPackage: cgToCDocOverviewCGDocRelNotesFAQIndexPermutedIndex
Allegro CL version 8.2
Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2.
8.1 version

tab-position

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.

ToCDocOverviewCGDocRelNotesFAQIndexPermutedIndex
Allegro CL version 8.2
Unrevised from 8.1 to 8.2.
8.1 version