Drop-Down Boxes in Director

 

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I want to insert a drop down menu (like in a web browser) into Director for a user form. Is there an Xtra or some code that can do this?

Actually you won't need to buy a thing.  If you have Internet Explorer 4 or greater and ActiveX installed, then you are ready to go.  Director's ActiveX Xtra is great for a lot of add-on functionality, but can be a bit frustrating.  You need to have the proper program installed, and then play with the ActiveX control until you figure out how to get it to function properly.  IE has a built in ActiveX component to do just what you are looking for.  On a PC, open Director and choose Insert>Control>ActiveX.  From there a dialog box will open asking you to pick a component.  Choose the MS Forms 2.0 ComboBox control and click OK.  (Fig. 1) Fig.1 Now you get a list of parameters you can modify.  For now we will leave these alone.  Click OK and move the new cast member to a score channel.  We are going to use an on beginSprite handler to make the list, so for testing, try to avoid putting it in the first frame.  Now we create a behavior to populate the list.  Note that there is no parameter to hold all of this from the onset, so we have to build the list as soon as the sprite is active.  Here is the basic behavior... property startText, choiceList, whatDo, spriteNum on getPropertyDescriptionList me   return [#startText : [#format : #string, #default : "DefaultText", #comment : "Default text in drop-box."], #choiceList : [#format : #string, #comment : "List of choices separated by (;)", #default : "Choice 1;Choice 2;Choice 3"]] end  on beginSprite me   the itemDelimiter = ";"   repeat with x = 1 to choiceList.item.count     addItem(sprite spriteNum, choiceList.item[x])   end repeat (sprite spriteNum).text = startText end   on getBehaviorDescription me   describe = "Combo box startUp script. Requires the MS Forms Combo Box Active X." & return & "Drop this behavior on a Microsoft ComboBox ActiveX sprite.  This will build and populate the dropdown list.  To retrieve the property just get the text of sprite X property for the ActiveX Sprite."   return describe end We drag this to the sprite, type in the default test, and then add the list of items separated by a ";" but no extra spaces.  If you look through the behavior you can see that we are taking the "list" which is just a string and separating it by the itemDelimiter, which we have set to ";".  Then we just take each item and use the ActiveX component's "addItem" handler to add each item.  From here we can get the user's chosen value at any time by calling the text of sprite property of the ActiveX Sprite.  (put sprite(1).text).