Re: Dialog enhance fselect / dselect

[Tiago Teixeira]

On 16/11/19 15:14, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 04:47:40PM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> > Good afternoon,
> >
> > While using dialog, when prompting to select a folder, I noticed the
> > "Directories"/"Files" is not changeable, which I kinda needed to be.
> "kinda" is vague - it might be nice to know what problem is solved.
>   


In this program I'm writing, I'm prompting the user 3-4 times for a 
directory, each time for a different purpose, and all in a row (ask for 
backend source directory, frontend source directory, etc ...).


The dselect dialog (and fselect, same function deep down), simply shows 
a "gui" with a pure directory selection, that is, (the dialog title,) a 
"subtitle" or text saying "Directories" or "Files" and then the actual 
directory selection below - current directory listing and current selection.


To ask the user 3-4 times for a directory selection, I currently have to 
show, before each 'dselect', another dialog (infobox/msgbox) to tell the 
user what the selection will be for.


So I thought it would be nice if that "Directories"/"Files" text could 
be changed.


> > I noticed fselect/dselect takes 4 parameters, with a 5th optional parameter
> > (which seemed unused), so I took advantage of that to make that 5th argument
> > the prompt.
> you could add a new function which does this, but changing an existing
> function won't work for me.

I tried to make the change minimal.


You can see, in the file 'dialog.c', in the modes[] array, (around) line 
1249, the dselect and at line 1251 the fselect, both modes take a 
minimum of 4 parameters, and a maximum of 5.


That 5th parameter is not being used anywhere (refer to line 922 - 
call_dselect and line 942 - call_fselect).


I "took advantage" of that 5th parameter and added one last parameter 
'char* prompt' to some functions (dialog_dselect, dialog_fselect and 
dlg_fselect) to, inside dlg_select, if that prompt string is defined ( 
not NULL ), use it instead of "Directories" or "Files".


This doesn't break anything, compilation runs smooth and usage is the same.