Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform

3.2. Native UI Elements – Dialogs, Menus and Selection Lists

Let's now look in detail at some of the native UI elements or dialogs that PyS60 offers.

3.2.1. Single-Field Dialog: query

Syntax: query(label, type[, initial value ])

Example code:

appuifw.query(u"Type a word:", "text", u"Foo")

This function shows a single-field dialog. The dialog can include some instruction text that is passed as a string (by putting the u in front of the string) to the parameter, label. The type of the dialog is defined by the parameter, type. The value of type can be any of the following strings: "text", "number", "date", "time", "code", "query" or "float" (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3-1. Types of single-field dialog: (a) text, (b) number, (c) date, (d) time, (e) code and (f) query

An initial value can be included, so the dialog shows a default input value when it appears on the phone screen. This is done simply by adding the initial value as an input parameter to the function, for example:

appuifw.query(u"Type a word:", "text", u"Foo")

The return value of the appuifw.query() function depends on the type parameter:

• For text fields (types of 'text' and 'code'), the return value is a Unicode string.

• For number fields, it is an integer.

• For date fields, it is the number of seconds since the epoch (0:00 on 1 January 1970, UTC) rounded down to the nearest local midnight.

Exercise

To see how the various ...