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.

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This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.