Minor text field annoyance

General Discussion
1

I have a form that I copy and paste data into from another application. My form can easily end up having multiple blinking cursors at the same time.

To replicate the issue:

  • Add a few text fields to a window
  • Type some text in the first field but don’t press tab or enter
  • Click on anything outside of your designer/client
  • Click on your second field and type text but not tab or enter
  • Click on anything outside of your designer/client
  • Click on 3rd text field

You should now have multiple text fields with blinking cursors, making them all look as if they are currently being edited. I would have guessed having “Commit On Focus Loss” set to True would resolve the issue, but it doesn’t.

I haven’t found a solution to this yet. Any ideas?

p.s. I know I can press enter or tab to commit the edit before clicking outside the app and avoid the issue but I’m looking for a script fix. Users don’t like like being told that they have to use a very specific order of operations to avoid something that irks them.

2

Heh. Interesting bug. I just confirmed with v7.9.5 on Linux (vanilla kernel 4.14.8) and Oracle JDK 1.8.0_152. What’s especially interesting is that cursor in the last field before switching away disappears at that point, but returns when java regains focus.

3

I know this is old, but I just happened on it and thought the solution we used to get rid of annoying text input highlights that would hang around on a touch screen after entry might be a useful workaround for this. We put a mouseover script on the background of the window to set the focus to another component (in our case, a component outside the viewable area to eliminate all highlights on the screen).

This may or may not work well for you. In our use case, the fact focus is immediately lost (and highlight removed) when cursor moves outside text/numeric input field isn’t a problem. We actually prefer that operators can’t accidentally enter values in an input box their cursor is no longer on top of.

4

That’s an interesting idea. I will have to give that a try. Thanks for sharing that.

5

@JGJohnson You’re welcome. Hope it works well for you. We found the yellow highlights in large text boxes styled to be invisible so dark blue background shown through were really distracting and haven’t run into any drawbacks with this solution to our problem so far.