Re: Toolbar won't accept input

At 11:28 PM -0500 3/22/04, Gary Palter wrote:
>We're building an application using LispWorks for Macintosh.
>
>Our client requires that the application have a single, global, 
>floating toolbar.  I found how to create such an entity by examining 
>the LispWorks podium toolbar (i.e., the interface of class 
>lispworks-tools::lispworks-toolbar-window) in the inspector.  I 
>found that if I specify
>
>       :window-styles '(:hides-on-deactivate :borderless
>                        :always-on-top :movable-by-window-background)
>
>in my toolbar's interface definition, I get the desired behavior.
>
>But, of course, there's a caveat ...
>
>Unlike the LispWorks toolbar, the client's application requires that 
>we include a text-input-choice pane in the toolbar.  (The concept is 
>similar to the input are in the Excel toolbar; eventually, like 
>Excel, our application will also include in-cell editing of data in 
>addition to the toolbar's editing pane.)
>
>Imagine my surprise when I found that, while the text input pane 
>appears in the toolbar, I can't type anything into it!
>
>If I remove the :borderless attribute from the window styles, I can 
>type into the text-input-choice pane in the toolbar window.  But now 
>the toolbar window has a title bar and resize widget which is not 
>acceptable to our client (or to us, for that matter).
>
>Does anyone have any ideas on what to try now?  (I asked the client; 
>moving the toolbar to the document windows isn't acceptable.)

After some investigation of the Apple documentation, I found that the 
behavior I'm seeing is the default behavior of Cocoa windows.  (I.e., 
a window cannot receive keyboard events unless it has a title bar or 
resize widget.  It can change that behavior by overriding the 
canBecomeKeyWindow method.)

On looking at Excel, I noticed that its toolbars have a thin title 
bar on the left edge with just a close button.  (Yes, I know Excel 
isn't Cocoa...)

Does anyone know if there's a way to have CAPI do something similar?

   - Gary Palter
     Principal Software Engineer
     Clozure Associates
     Cell:  617-947-0536