Question

I have a drop-down list which contains hundreds of items (Strings).

When a user enters a letter-key, the the drop-down selects the first alphabetic string with that letter-key (which is what I want).

The problem is when the users enters in another letter, the drop-down list does not continue the search.

So my question is how can you get these drop-down lists to search more than on letter at a time.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The first part of your answer is that there is no simple attribute to set that will produce the functionality you’re after; you’ll have to leverage code to create it.

If you’re using PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC), you can use the DataWindow DropDown Search service, starting with calling u_dw.of_SetDropDownSearch(TRUE). You’ll want to look at the PFC help file for more details on how to use the service.

If you don’t use PFC, you can still download the code from Sybase and adapt it to your application. The object you’ll want to start looking at is (pfcdwsrv.pbl)pfc_n_cst_dwsrv_dropdownsearch, and how (pfemain.pbl)u_dw calls the descendant (pfedwsrv.pbl)n_cst_dwsrv_dropdownsearch.

Very basically, on the EditChanged event, the service

• gets the text the user has typed (note that your DDDW column has to be editable)
• finds an item in the DropDownDataWindow where the typed text matches the start of the item
• populates the column with the matching item, selecting the text after what the user has already typed

There’s more to the service that you’ll probably want to browse.

Good luck,

Terry