Re: modal dialogs

[Adrian Robert]

On Aug 17, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Marc Brünink wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> we're running GNUstep on a Windows machine. Probably everyone know  
> that ;-)
> We've an application which opens modal dialogs (NSAlertPanel,  
> NSOpenPanel, ...). If such a dialog pops up and the user clicks on  
> the main window of the application everything is doomed because the  
> panel window disappears. Either the panel window is minimized or  
> (more probably) the main window is ordered front wrongfully.
>
> However: this is damn bad. Does anyone have a clue how to fix this?

Hi,

Previously to about 5 months ago, event loop code in NSApplication  
would redisplay a modal window every iteration (i.e., every few  
milliseconds), which would have eliminated this problem.  However  
that led to other issues and the code was changed to only put it up  
once, and let the rest of the interaction be handled by the window  
manager.  I assume this differs from other apps on Windows and that  
the desired behavior is:

1) ignore clicks on other app windows once the dialog is put up

2) if the user selects another app, then selects the given app again,  
raise the dialog window no matter how the app was activated (e.g., by  
a click on the main window)

I think (2) could be accomplished by checking for an active modal  
window whenever an activate app message is received, and ordering  
that window front.  (The activate-app message is currently handled in  
NSApplication I believe.)  (1) I'm not 100% sure about, because I  
don't understand well how window-raise and window-click events are  
passed through to the app and what is handled foremost by the window  
manager on different platforms.  However we do want to avoid going  
back to the old hack of just re-raising the modal window every  
iteration through the event loop, which wrongly interfered with the  
use of other applications.