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Hi Peeps,
I have wrote an application which has large enough picture boxes to the user can use there finger to select. I also have some text boxes which the user needs to enter numbers in. Is there any control or way to show a large numeric keypad so the user does not have to go back to using the stylist?
Thanks for any help,
Jiggy!
You could just throw up another form with a grid of buttons on it. You could tie the forms launch to clicking on the text box. I'm a programming newb, but that's how I would probably do it.
I only use one form on all PDA programs, but use panels, instead. Therefore, I am always swapping panels in and out of the view. To handle numeric entry, which comes up alot, I swap in a keypad panel which has the ten digits plus a decimal point (I made that optional, so that it is shown or not depending on the situation). The textbox and a label by the textbox sit at the top. There are also >> and << buttons that take the user to the next or last panel. The whole thing is set up as a state machine, so to switch panels I just set the state variable for the next panel and call the function to set the view, which is a select statement on the state variable. This is all done because panels are so much faster than forms for portable programs.
Of course, this means that if I have more than one numeric field that I am entering data into, the numeric panel will be shown again and again. Each field will be one particular state. When that state is called, a function is called to set up the panel (loading any existing data into the textbox, or setting a default, setting the state of the decimal button, and setting the text of the label), then the panel is swapped into the view.
This technique restricts data entry to a single field at a time, though, which may not be quite what you want. An alternative would be to make the number pad smaller, and shrink it down lower on the screen. I felt that for the size of my fingers, I needed to get those numbers as big as I could, and leaving only enough room for a textbox and label meant that I could get the numbers just barely large enough that they were easy to use. They certainly aren't excessive, which means that if you try to make room for multiple fields, you might do so at the expense of making the number buttons too small to use by finger alone.
We have 4 text box like values a user can enter into - when they click the screen to indicate they want to adjust any of these values it changes to a "view" (using Shaggyhikers panel trick) that shows the textboxes with "slider" controls so that they can slide the value up and down. Click on the prompt next to the textbox increments it by one as well. Along with all this the "normal" input keyboard appears at the bottom of the screen if they want to enter a value that way.
Granted this is very specific to what we are doing - but that's the point of these PDA's - getting the click motions down to the least-amount for the most complete range of needs.
Thank you all very much for your help. I only have two textboxes so I will have a try at the slider as the values being entered are going to be between 1 and 10.
Thanks again,
Jiggy!