BBC BASIC Programmers' Reference

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Setting the focus in a dialogue box

by Richard Russell, May 2010

If you want to initialise a dialogue box so that the input focus is on a particular control, simply make that control the first in the template (i.e. the first to be created after calling FN_newdialog). By default the first control always gains the initial focus.

However if you want to move the input focus to a different control, once the dialogue box has been opened, you should do that using the following code:

      WM_NEXTDLGCTL = 40
      SYS "GetDlgItem", !dlg%, id% TO hdlgctl%
      SYS "PostMessage", !dlg%, WM_NEXTDLGCTL, hdlgctl%, 1

where dlg% is the value returned from FN_newdialog and id% is the ID of the control that you want to receive the input focus.