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dialog tag

Transient logic tag

Prompts the user for input using a pop-up dialog box. The user may be prompted to select from multiple options, or enter text input.

Sample usage

<dialog title={Error} {You can't select that option now}> — Displays a message, with an OK button to close it.

<dialog {Exit now?} choices={OK} symbol={?}> — Displays a question prompt with a question mark symbol where the user can either select "OK" or they can cancel the dialog prompt.

Fields

Primary field

Scalar field

Specifies the text the user is to be prompted with. For example, {Enter your name:}, or {Are you sure you wish to continue?}.

Secondary fields

text: (optional) Set to true to prompt the user for text input. Set to false (default) to allow only predefined responses.
choices: (optional) For a non-text dialog, a list of responses the user can choose from; a Cancel button is always included. For a text dialog, suggestions the user can pick or type over. If left out on a non-text dialog, the dialog simply displays the message, with an OK button.
symbol: (optional) A symbol to display with the message, such as {?}.
title: (optional) Sets a title to be displayed above the prompt message.

Behaviour

What the tag generates depends on the kind of dialog:

With choices: the number of the choice selected, counting from 1. Choices are offered in a drop-down list, with OK and Cancel buttons.
With text=true: the text the user entered. Any choices are offered as suggestions in an editable drop-down list, with the first one filled in.
With neither: nothing useful; the dialog only displays its message.
If the user cancels: an empty value.

When the tag is complete, user interaction with the console is temporarily suspended and a dialog prompt is shown to the user. After the user responds to the dialog prompt, the dialog tag generates a value containing the user's response to the prompt. The tag's lifetime then ends.

Notes

How a dialog looks, and which of its fields are shown, is decided by the framing manager of the user's desktop environment. For example, the Periscope framing manager shows the dialog as a panel across the top of the program, with its title above the message, its symbol beside it, and the choices and Cancel on the keyboard's function keys and Esc key. Without a framing manager, a plain pop-up box is shown, which may leave out the title and symbol.

Although the dialog tag displays stuff on the screen, it behaves as a transient logic tag rather than a presentation tag. This is because it evaluates and generates a result once, rather than creating a persistent tag instance in the document tree.

Example

The following example demonstrates how you can output a dialog tag from a Python program to get the user's response to a simple OK/Cancel question, and get the user's response input back to your program in the simple format of "Y" for yes or "N" for no.

user_response = input('<putLn|if <dialog {Are you sure you want to continue?} choices={OK}> then={Y} else={N}>')