Filtering Entries in Combo Box and List Box Text

Some JADE development environment and Painter forms allow filtering of combo box and list box entries, to enable you to locate a required list item more quickly, in a similar way to the F4 (Find Type) functionality. This feature uses standard combo box and list box facilities to achieve this filtering, and applies to the following forms and controls.

• Painter Load Form dialog Form list box.

  When editing a form, the Load Form dialog provides the Show as Hierarchy check box, which defaults to false (that is, unchecked). When unchecked, the list is displayed alphabetically sorted and it allows the filtering process to be performed. When it is checked, the list is displayed in hierarchical form and the filtering process is not performed.

• Painter Find Control dialog Control to Find combo box.

• Define Reference dialog Type combo box (only for the current class on the left of the extended form of the dialog).

• Quick Navigation dialog Class combo box.

• Define Class dialog Subclass of combo box.

• Find Unused Class Entities dialog Search selected class in selected schema combo box.

• Find Unused Local Variables and Parameters dialog Search selected class in selected schema combo box.

• Find Possible Transient Class Leaks dialog Search for creates of selected class in all schemas combo box.

• Navigation bar in hierarchy browser combo boxes (that is, for classes, properties, and methods lists).

When you enter text in a combo box or the text box associated with a list box, the displayed list items are only those entries that contain the specified text (case‑insensitive) or if the specified text is all uppercase, the entries with the same Pascal case (for example, CA matches CustomerAddress). Because the search process handles uppercase searches if all text entered after the first character is uppercase, the list includes all entries in which the first character of the entity name matches the first entered character and the entity name has uppercase characters that match the order of the remaining entered uppercase text. For example, entering sNT in the method combo box of the navigation bar includes method names searchNameTextOnly and someNumberedTest.

To select the entry that you want to locate in a list box (for example, in the Find Type dialog or using AutoComplete functionality in the editor pane), use the:

• Pascal-type uppercasing. For example, entering XDG includes any entries that begin with X and have the D and G as the next uppercase characters in the name (for example, XamlDataGrid). This also works where the first character is lowercase; for example, iD would include includeDict.

• Camel case filtering when the:

  • First sequence of uppercase characters of the list item matches the filter text in that order.

  • Uppercase sequence anywhere in the text of a list box item; for example, CA matches the entry of a CMClass_Customer_Address class. This avoids having to type any XXXX prefix you may have on all your class names, which reduces the number of characters that need to be typed to find a camel case match.

To select the entry that you want to locate in the combo box or list box, perform one of the following actions.

• Type at least the first few characters of the entity. The list display starts with the entity that matches your specified value. For example, if you have classes named ProcessStackArray, ProdMaint, Product, and ProductDict, if you enter pro in the Find text box, ProcessStackArray is then selected in the list box. However, if you enter produ, the Product class is then selected.

• When you enter text into text box, only those entities that contain the specified text somewhere in the type name of the entry are made visible in the list box. For example, if you specify cust when searching for a class, only those classes that contain cust somewhere in the class name are displayed. (The selection is case‑insensitive.)

  The first entry that begins with the specified text is selected. If no entry starts with the specified text, no entry is selected. Use the up and down arrow keys to select and move through the entries in the list. The list box behaves the same as the AutoComplete list box. For details, see "AutoComplete List Box Behavior", elsewhere in this chapter.

You can achieve the same thing in your own JADE systems, as follows.

• Set the value of the style property for the ComboBox control class to ComboBox.Style_DropDown (0).

• The ComboBox or ListBox control class hasPictures, hasTreeLines, and hasPlusMinus properties are all set to false.

• The sorted property of the ComboBox or ListBox control class must be set to false after the list is loaded.

• A disabled description list item is added as the first entry in the list (after sorting is turned off).

• The change event on the combo box or associated text box calls a filtering routine to hide or show the entries based on the new text entered.

  Setting the level of the item to 2 hides the entries, which is why there has to be an entry at item position 1 that is always at level 1. (A child item must have a parent.)

2020.0.01 and higher