Browse Folder Dialog

[supertodd85]

The browse folder dialog seems to have a strange UI problem. In a standard "Installation Folder" screen, a user can click the "Change" button to browse for a file. There is a text box in that dialog that seems to be useless. It displays the currently selected folder name, but text entry in this text box seems to do nothing. A user cannot type in the folder name they want to use, since the path is simply taken from the currently selected folder.

The most troubling part of this problem is that the "Make New Folder" button is right below this text box. In testing our installer, a lot of users have been entering text into that field, clicking "Make New Folder" and then expecting the name in the text box to be the name of the new folder. Also, a lot of users will click "Make New Folder", which makes a folder titled "New Folder" and because that folder is selected, the text box displays "New Folder". The user will then try to change that name in the text field, which of course does nothing.

This bug is causing a lot of problems, and some of our product managers are unwilling to ship our product because of this confusion.

May I suggest just changing that text box into a label, where the text cannot be editable. It makes no sense to have an editable text box here.

[Lorne]

That's the standard Windows Folder Browse Dialog, it's part of the operating system. If they have trouble with it there, they're going to have trouble with it in other applications too.

I'm not the biggest fan of it either to be honest, but I never use the Change button myself...I always just type my installation paths.

If you don't like that dialog, you could:

• Hide the Change button, so they never see it.
• Edit the On Ctrl Message script to use a Dialog.Input action instead of calling g_EditFieldFolderBrowse.
• Edit the On Ctrl Message script to use a Dialog.FileBrowse action. Use "The filename will be ignored" as the default text for the filename field. Then use string actions to get the folder path from the file path the user selected.
• Edit the On Ctrl Message script to call a custom DLL that displays a browse dialog. Include the DLL in your project as a primer file so it's available at the beginning of the setup.