G4 Keyboard Retun String

TurnipTruck

Greetings,

I am programming a system blind and cannot experiment to find the answer to this.

What, if anything, will a G4 panel add to a string returned to a master beyond the data entered on the keyboard?

In G3 it preceded the text with KEYB-

DHawthorne

The string prefix is the name of the text display button, and the hyphen is part of that name (which I recommend you include for easier parsing). This is on the General tab of the properties. On the program tab you need to specify port 0 as the address port, and one of the text area fields from the dropdown as the address code.

TurnipTruck

What about the channel port and code?

I currently have the channel port as 0-setup port and channel code as PageFlip: Keyboard.

I set the address port for 0 as you stated and set the address code for Text Area single line.

My string output port is 1 and that is the port of the D:P:S that triggers the data event in my code.

I set the button name as KEYB- which should give me the same header on my string as did the G3 panels.

Sound OK?

joeyjoejo1200

With the G4 Keyboards/keypads the buttons don't return the string, the text input button does.

With G3 each button sent a string each time it was pressed.

With G4 each button manipulates what is in the text input button, when done is pressed G4 takes the text on the text input button and sends it to the string buffer on port 1 prepended by the name of the button.

Channels and Addresses should have no effect on this. The idea was to have customizeable keyboards/keypads and not have to write all the code to manage the keyboard. One of the neat features of the keyboard/keypad engine in G4 is that it (for most keys) uses the text on the button to know what char/chars to add the to text area. For example if you had a keyboard for entering web addresses you could just copy the "x" button, change the text to "www." and when a user presses that button, it will add it to the text area. It will even work with buttons whose text was updated via a send_command, so you could actually use it has a preset selector for audio conferencer. It has lots of room to be used.

Also you can copy the system keyboards/keypads from the system template into your file (and they will get renamed to a single underscore prefix), and if you leave the name alone, "__keyboard" becomes "_keyboard" whenever a keyboard is needed it will call your local version. This lets you uses all the existing keyboard stuff, but customize the look. And with the keyboards/keypads we have now the buttons are all Chameleons so changing the color is a snap.

TurnipTruck

DHawthorne wrote:

The string prefix is the name of the text display button, and the hyphen is part of that name

The return string is headed with KEYB- regardless of what I name the button. My system is up and running, but being able to change that prefix would be a nice thing.

Could I have not configured something properly?

joeyjoejo1200

You can change the name of the text input button and that IS the prefix.

DHawthorne

TurnipTruck wrote:

The return string is headed with KEYB- regardless of what I name the button. My system is up and running, but being able to change that prefix would be a nice thing.

Could I have not configured something properly?

Note, it is the hame of the text area button, not any of your others.

Chip Moody

Last I looked, hitting enter on a G3 keypad/board caused the entire typed string to be sent back - not on a key by key basis. Or you're talking about something else and I'm confused. Or you're talking about assiging text to individual buttons and not using the built-in keypad/keyboard...

Or....... ?

- Chip

joeyjoejo1200 wrote:

With G3 each button sent a string each time it was pressed.

kennyann

Is there any way to put in the $0D at the end of the text being returned from the keyboard. This will make my parsing of the string returned easier.

DHawthorne

Chip Moody wrote:

Last I looked, hitting enter on a G3 keypad/board caused the entire typed string to be sent back - not on a key by key basis. Or you're talking about something else and I'm confused. Or you're talking about assiging text to individual buttons and not using the built-in keypad/keyboard...

Or....... ?

- Chip

We are talking G4. It's completely different from G3.

DHawthorne

kennyann wrote:

Is there any way to put in the $0D at the end of the text being returned from the keyboard. This will make my parsing of the string returned easier.

There is no need. If you use the STRING handler of your DATA_EVENT for the panel, the string output of the keypad will be the entire value of DATA.TEXT. Tagging a $0D on the end won't help you unless you are buffering responses and queuing them up, but it's not necessary to do so.

kennyann

Thank you for your reply. My application has three touch panels. I am using Port 8 for one of my device A. I track all the data that the user inputs on each touch panel and update my array. Since the text data from the touch panel is coming from port 1 - i had the keyboard for that particular device send out the string output as Port8. This way I know the string that is coming from the touch panel is for device A. eg. If the user inputs RED1 - I get two sets of data - Port8 then RED1 soon after. If tried to use DATA.TEXT - it seems that l loose Port8 unless I am doing something wrong. It seems to work I buffer the data but I rather use DATA.TEXT if all possible.

DHawthorne

DATA.TEXT from a text field button always comes in on port 1. If you set the string output for a button (G3 style), that follows the port properly, but not the text fields from keypad or keyboard pages. If you need to distinguish messages from various ports, you have to rename your text field button and parse according to the name, not the port.

kennyann

Dear Dave:

Thank you for that info. That is what I had to try to use DATA.TEXT. It worked great. Thank you.