What is the correct way to set form values?

Paul,

You didn't show enough of the code to see how the form was created, but if it's a form created with hiCreateAppForm and you didn't pass ?dontBlock t, then it will be blocking. The newer layout forms (created with hiCreateLayoutForm) are non-blocking though. If the form is blocking that means that the hiDIsplayForm() will block until the form has been cancelled or OK'd, and so it won't get to the code modifying the fields until you've OK'd or cancelled the form.

Why not make the changes you want before displaying the form?

Also, it's possible that the way you are storing this valueFields slot may not be the right way - it looks as if it's probably just the fields before they are added to the form, and so they may not be properly linked to the form in question. 

If you want a better answer, you'll need to provide a complete example because the problem is most likely in part of the code you've not shared - I'm having to guess a little what might be wrong.

Regards,

Andrew

Put another way, updating fields is normally a matter of doing:

form->theField->value="blah"
hiSetFIeldEnabled(form->theField t) 

Andrew

Hello Andrew,

thank you for your comment. The adding to the form gave me the right idea where to look. Indeed I created the form fields with hiCreate... and added them to a layout form. I then stored the fields in the 'valueFields' variable. This was done before displaying the form. 

I realized, that the objects returned from an instantiated form are different from the objects used during creation (first is of type 'other'  second of type '...struct'). I was confused, because the 'struct' objects I changed seem to be still linked to the 'other' objects, because changing the 'value' of one affected both.

Hello Andrew,

thank you for your comment. The adding to the form gave me the right idea where to look. Indeed I created the form fields with hiCreate... and added them to a layout form. I then stored the fields in the 'valueFields' variable. This was done before displaying the form. 

I realized, that the objects returned from an instantiated form are different from the objects used during creation (first is of type 'other'  second of type '...struct'). I was confused, because the 'struct' objects I changed seem to be still linked to the 'other' objects, because changing the 'value' of one affected both.

Hi Paul,

Yes if I understood correctly the behavior, when you use hiCreate...Field it returns kind of a generator which is then used to instanciate the field on any form it is added to

I encountered this problem in SKILL++ when I was trying to build closures defining the field to access it quickly in callbacks

Here is a dummy example of what I intended (which does not work):

(inScheme

(let (field)

(defglobalfun custom_field nil
 (or field (setq field (hiCreateIntField ?name 'int ?prompt "Integer")))
 (hiCreateHorizontalBoxLayout 'int_layout ?items (list
 field
 (hiCreateButton ?name 'increment_button ?buttonText "Increment"
 ?callback (lambda (@rest _args) (setf field->value (add1 field->value))))
 ))
 )

);closure

(hiDisplayForm (hiCreateLayoutForm 'custom_form "Custom Form" (custom_field)))
)

The only solution I found for now is to always access the field from the form (either by storing the form in my closure or using the callbacks first argument)

Cheers

Aurélien

Hi Aurélien,

The whole point of adding function object support for callbacks in hi was to allow closures to be created for callbacks, but you do need to use the arguments passed to those function object callbacks to access the fields. You can't just use the field objects which are not attached to the form. You can of course close over other objects and access those - that's the benefit.

Andrew