Going Beyond the Basics (cont'd)
Popup
menus are a great way to present a list of items for selection. They're
familiar, easy to use, and take virtually no space when not being used. The
DH_PopupMenu module offers a variety of popup menu options.
You can connect it
anywhere you need a List Entry type control, through a Patch Mem - List2 in the same
way as a Dropdown List.
A
menu can be displayed in multi-column format, with or without column
separators, by choosing these options in the module's Properties, as shown
on the right.
By teaming up DH_PopupMenu with DH_TextList, you can add horizontal line breaks, non-selectable headings, and column breaks at arbitrary intervals.
This is achieved by using a few special formatting characters in the list file you create for DH_TextList.
The following are recognized as formatting characters if they are the 1st character in an item:
--- ; (one or more hyphens, followed by a semicolon to end the line) inserts a horizontal separator.
~ (tilde) at the beginning of an item marks it as non-selectable for category headings and the like.
| (vertical bar) at the beginning of an item forces a column break with a vertical bar separator.
] (right square bracket) at the beginning of an item forces a column break without a vertical bar separator.
The list file used to create the above menu can be viewed here.
A final note: the code that interprets the formatting characters is in the DH_PopupMenu module. Therefore, you must use its "Selection" pin, not the DH_TextList's Text I/O pin, to get the correct text for the selected item if you use formatting characters. The Index pins on both modules will still give identical results in any case.