Borland Inprise Logo   Programmer's Paradise Borland Announces Delphi 5 Ad Banner

Home Pages | Shopping | Swap Meet | Books | Community TV | CodeCentral | Bug Tracking | Careers | Partners | Diversions | Collaboration | reSearch Center | Downloads | Product Registration | Museum | Newsgroups | Chat
Spacer Image
Home  >  C++   >   Components   >   VCL   >   Article
 
 
Borland Developer Support

Making a ComboBox that autocompletes text as you type

Have you ever noticed how in Location boxes for browser windows and the Windows run box, whatever you type is autocompleted for you if it already exists in the combobox? Have you ever wanted to put this functionality into a combobox of your own and tried many times to get it to work? In this TI, I will explain the (relatively simple) process of adding this autocomplete feature to a TComboBox. In order to add autocomplete features to a TComboBox, you need to trap the OnKeyDown and OnChange events. In these events you will do all of the searching, replacing, and selecting. The Win32 ComboBox control actually _does_ have autocomplete built into it, but it is not always implemented. To help you out with this feature, the Win32 API has several messages: CB_FINDSTRING Finds a string based on a case-insensitive search of the first few letters. CB_FINDSTRINGEXACT Finds the first list box string in a combo box that matches the string specified. CB_SELECTSTRING Searches the list of a combo box for an item that begins with the characters in a specified string. If a matching item is found, it is selected and copied to the edit control. Because of the way TComboBox is designed, we will only be using CB_FINDSTRING. In this example, I load some data from the customers.db table from BCDEMOS to populate the list, then trap the OnKeyDown and OnChange events. CB_FINDSTRING takes, as its first parameter (wParam), the index of the item before the start of the search. Since we are searching the whole list, we set it to -1. The second parameter is the address of the string to search for. -------------Code-------------- //cb is the ComboBox //lastKey is a private member of TForm1 __fastcall TForm1::TForm1(TComponent* Owner) : TForm(Owner) { } //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- void __fastcall TForm1::FormCreate(TObject *Sender) { Table1->Open(); //get data from the table Table1->First(); while (!Table1->Eof) { cb->Items->Add(Table1->FieldByName("Contact")->AsString); Table1->Next(); } } //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- void __fastcall TForm1::cbKeyDown(TObject *Sender, WORD &Key, TShiftState Shift) { lastKey = Key; //get the last key the user hit in the ComboBox } //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- void __fastcall TForm1::cbChange(TObject *Sender) { String srch = cb->Text; //text to search for if ((lastKey == 0x08) || (lastKey == VK_DELETE)) //if they hit backspace or delete, { //get out of here lastKey = 0; return; } lastKey = 0; int ix = cb->Perform(CB_FINDSTRING,-1,(LPARAM)srch.c_str()); //find the string in the list if (ix != CB_ERR) { cb->ItemIndex = ix; //set the ComboBox text accordingly cb->SelStart = srch.Length(); cb->SelLength = (cb->Text.Length()-srch.Length()); //select the appropriate text } } //---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article ID: 20410   Publish Date: December 22, 1999  Last Modified: December 28, 1999

   
© 1999 Inprise Corp.
Top of Page
Put Your Ad Banner Here Banner
   
1