Chapter 12
Creating Interactive Dialog Boxes
Dialog boxes are an important part of most applications. You've seen dialog boxes used for many of the examples so far in the book. A dialog box can serve to inform (MsgBox) or obtain simple input (InputBox). However, sometimes you need to obtain more information than a simple input box can provide. Interactive dialog boxes are a cornerstone of many applications with any complexity, and they aren't even hard to create: All you do is drag and drop the items you want on the blank dialog box—really, it's that simple!
Of course, dragging and dropping controls onto a dialog box won't do much. First, you want to make sure that the controls appear in a logical manner and that they're easy to use. All of us have had to deal with dialog boxes that were less than appealing. Sometimes, a dialog box is constructed so poorly that it's simply frustrating to use. This chapter spends some time reviewing techniques you can use to keep users of your dialog boxes happy.
IDEAScript provides you with access to all of the standard controls (a visual element on a dialog box)—view them as a toolbox of controls. As with any toolbox, you need to know what the toolbox contains in order to use the tools inside efficiently. This chapter also spends time telling you about the controls that IDEAScript provides and helps you understand when each control works best, so you don't try to use a text box where a list box would work better (akin to pounding in a screw with ...
