The following enhancements have been made to IDL's UI toolkit for the 6.0 release to help you give your IDL applications more powerful and friendly user interfaces:
The DIALOG_PICKFILE function now allows you to specify a default extension, with the DEFAULT_EXTENSION keyword. By setting this keyword to a scalar string representing the default extension, you can append the value returned by DIALOG_PICKFILE with this extension.
You can now also prompt users when using DIALOG_PICKFILE to attempt to overwrite files. By setting the OVERWRITE_PROMPT keyword along with the WRITE keyword, DIALOG_PICKFILE will automatically prompt the user with an overwrite dialog when a file that already exists is selected. See DIALOG_PICKFILE for details.
The PUSHBUTTON_EVENTS keyword has been added to WIDGET_BUTTON, allowing you to create buttons that generate separate widget events when the mouse button or space bar is pressed and released. See WIDGET_BUTTON for details.
The PUSHBUTTON_EVENTS keyword has been added to WIDGET_CONTROL, allowing you to change the widget event generation properties of a button widget after creation. See WIDGET_CONTROL for details.
The PUSHBUTTON_EVENTS keyword has been added to WIDGET_INFO, allowing you to query the pushbutton events setting of a specified button widget. See WIDGET_INFO for details.
The new WIDGET_PROPERTYSHEET function creates a property sheet widget, which exposes the properties of an IDL object in a graphical interface.
For more details, see WIDGET_PROPERTYSHEET.
The WIDGET_CONTROL procedure and the WIDGET_INFO function now allow access to the new property sheet widget.
By setting WIDGET_CONTROL's new REFRESH_PROPERTY keyword to a property identifier or array of identifiers, you can synchronize the identified properties with their values in a component. See WIDGET_CONTROL for more details.
By setting WIDGET_INFO's new COMPONENT keyword to an object reference of a component, you can query specific components within a property sheet containing multiple components. By setting WIDGET_INFO's new PROPERTY_VALID keyword to a string, you can determine if that string is a valid identifier. If the identifier is valid, WIDGET_INFO's new PROPERTY_VALUE keyword can be set to this identifier to retrieve the value of the identified property within the property sheet. See WIDGET_INFO for more details.
The value of the list in a droplist widget can now be retrieved using the GET_VALUE keyword to WIDGET_CONTROL. The list values are returned as a scalar string or string array.