Replacement for floatingedit

What happened to floatingedit? What is a good and easy way of replacing it in a procedure in Panorama X? Thanks.

This is a definite hack to simulate the floatingedit and involves three stacked objects that appear on command and disappear automatically when editing is finished.

  1. Create Square Push Button Object set to transparent and named “floatingEditShield”. In the procedure pane put this:
    objectaction “floatingEdit”,“Open”
    // this is needed to keep clicks inside the edit box from triggering objects underneath

  2. Create white Rectangle Object w/drop shadow and name it “floatingEditMask”
    // this is a white mask to keep items underneath from showing through

  3. Create a Text Editing Object and name it “floatingEdit”. Set the TEO to “Field/Variable” with any field as the Data, a Bezel Border, Initial Selection to All and the Procedure to run at End Editing. - Note: the Focus ring will not show if it pops up over other objects so it is best not to use that option.

  4. Set the Procedure for the TEO to:
    selectobjects objectinfo(“name”) beginswith “floatingEdit”
    changeobjects
    “rectangle”,rectanglesize(1, 1, 1, 1)
    selectnoobjects
    resume “”

  5. In your procedure used to pop up the field editing TEO have these lines:
    local theField theField=“”
    popup info(“fields”),223,211,info(“fieldname”), theField
    selectobjects objectinfo(“name”) beginswith “floatingEdit”
    changeobjects
    “rectangle”,rectanglesize(223, 211, 113, 213),
    “FieldName”,theField
    selectnoobjects
    objectaction “floatingEdit”,“Open”
    pause “”"
    // add additional code after editing is finished if needed

At this point you will have three objects with the TEO on top, the Rectangle under that and the Push Button underneath the two others and all three at the front of the form. If you now run the above procedure you will have them all lined up on top of each other. They will be 211 points from the left edge and 223 from the top and 213 points wide by 113 high. You can adjust the values in the procedure to fit your exact needs. The values in the TEO procedure will not have to be changed since they simply reduce all three objects to a 1 x 1 point rectangle at the extreme top left of the window. Do not Group these objects or this will not work.

I put together the above example file and have it available here: http://www.unseensoft.com/FlotingEdit.zip

There is no good and easy way of replacing it. This was a very rarely used feature, and I deemed it not worth the engineering time to replicate it in Panorama X. (Please note that “rarely used” doesn’t mean “never”, I’m sure a handful of you will chime in that you have used it.)

My first suggestion would be to review why you were using this and whether you need it at all. Perhaps some other technique would work better, like a tab panel.

If you feel you really do need to suddenly create a text editor out of nowhere, Panorama X does allow you to create Text Editor objects (or any other kind of editor) on the fly in a program. This isn’t quite as easy as floatingedit but it’s not too hard.

Well, as I was typing this answer Gary Yonaites posted a specific example of how it’s done! Bravo!

Looking further at Gary’s solution, I see that he did it a bit differently than I suggested, in that he created the text editor object in advance and simply moved it into position, instead of creating and destroying it on the fly. Either technique should work.