[DUG] A good time picker???

[John Bird]

I would also be interested in this.....I have tended to just use edit boxes
mainly cos the standard VCL doesn't allow easy keyboard entry.  I do have a
couple of date conversion routines, eg for verifying that a string is a
valid date, and converting such a string into a TDateTime and to a numeric
date (Integer in format YYYYMMDD).  It accepts dates in a very flexible
form, eg for 1 Feb 2006 it accepts any of 

1.2.06
1/2/06
1.2.2006
1-feb-06
1 feb 2006

etc - and reformats the date input to a standardised format the programmer
chooses

Main thing it doesn't do is american dates (sorry to any yanks out there)

Happy to throw source for that into the pot (100 lines) - especially if
someone has a good date picker it could be attached to..

John

-----Original Message-----
From: delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz] On
Behalf Of Paul Heinz
Sent: Tuesday, 23 May 2006 12:05 p.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: RE: [DUG] A good time picker???


Phil asked:
> Anyone recommend a good date/time picker -especially a time picker?
>
> The trouble with the windows one and its wrappers are some very 
> annoying features. Picking off the drop down calandar is fine but slow 
> if the date you want is months or years away. Using the control direct 
> is bizarre. If you make a change, then you have arrow key to set it. 
> If you tab, then it reverts.
> Talk about frustrating.

Yep, the Windows DateTimePicker sucketh mightily, it's butt ugly and has
particularly bad and inconsistent keyboard handling. Note that Microsoft
doesn't use it in their apps noteably Outlook and the Outlook date/time
pickers (or Calendar controls) are the ones users are most likely to be
familiar with.

There was some Delphi code floating around the net which 'recreated' the
DateTimePicker (in all it's ugliness) in straight Delphi. I think it was
written for Kylix/Qt actually. Anyway, we used that as a base (loosely in
the end) to write an Outlook style Calendar control look-a-like with
improved keyboard handling to match our application conventions.

If you google around it should be out there still and you could use that as
a base like we did. If you can't find it, I might have a copy of the
original Delphi code lurking around somewhere...

> A visual way to think about time would be good. Just typing the time 
> works but the control has odd behaviour when you edit. I get bitten by 
> wrong time but struggle to reproduce just how I made the mistake.

So when you say visual time, do you want some sort of analog round clock
they can click on the edge to indicate a time? I've never seen anything like
that and I wonder if it would be rather hard to use accurately. Admittedly,
it might look cute though :-)

TTFN,
  Paul.



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