Manual Entry for Combo Boxes

When users select the ~Add Manually~ option from the combo box, or a range value defined for manual edit, the text box is enabled for manual entry. For example, if a combo box has a list of the colors red, blue, green, yellow, and other, users could select other and then type white in the text box.

No validation is done on the field, so any string can be entered, even if it does not relate to the field attribute.

The following shows a combo box for a Color field, with the adjacent text box enabled for manual edit. In this case, the selected option that allows manual entry is "~ Add Manually ~".

In the above example, the range value for manual entry is added as "!=?~ Add Manually ~". The "!=" indicates to the system that selection of this particular range value must enable the manual entry text box. You can only define one range value for a given attribute in this way.

In conjunction with the range value definition, you must use the following field settings:

Allow Manual Edit = true

Editable = True

Input Type = combobox

Optionally, you can specify the sort direction for the combo box as ascending (default), descending, or none:

Sort Direction = ascending

If you set Allow Manual Edit to false, the combo box is shown alone without an adjacent text box, and if there is a range value defined that is preceded with "!=", it is excluded from the list of options in the combo box. The following shows a combo box with Allow Manual Edit set to false: