How to delete tabs on tab order

[BJeppson]

I have inherited a form that has a tab order, but after the last valid tab there are a couple more placed in weird places in the form. How can I delete these random and unused tabs. If I don't delete them, the tabbed browsing doesn't work right.

[Former Community Member]

Under the View Menu in Designer there is a Tab Order tool. This will allow you to reset the tab order to whatever you want.

[BJeppson]

But if there are extra tabs I didn't put in, how to I remove them?

[Former Community Member]

Can't you simply remove the objects that you do not want to tab to or do you still need them there?

[BJeppson]

Somehow there are some stray tabs tied to pieces of text scattered around the document that aren't fields. So tabbing goes to those after the last field rather than to the first field on the next page of the form.

[BJeppson]

I have tried deleting the pieces of text and recreating them in new text boxes that aren't fields, but LiveCycle just renumbers the extra tabs. Perhaps if I could send a screen shot or something.

[Former Community Member]

Can you send your form to LiveCycle8@gmail.com and add a description of how to re-create the problem.

[Former Community Member]

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I have a similar problem with a multi-page document, where I have read-only fields that I bypassed by re-tabbing the pages. However, when I get to the end of the page, the tab order sends the focus to the read-only fields as opposed to going to the first entry field in the next page.



Is it possible to just delete a tab stop, whether the page has been re-tabbed or not?



Thanks,



TK

[Former Community Member]

You will have to go into the XML tab and remove the property "traversal" for the objects in question. This is what tells the field where to go next.

[Former Community Member]

I have the exact same issue I'm trying to deal with. I need to provide all the fields on a standardized form, but our company only requires part of them. I want the user to tab from required field to required field and then to go directly to the 2nd page's first required field.



I too had a few fields that at one point were added to the tab order and seem impossible to remove. At this point, I've needed to recreate the field and rename it. It seems to want to assign the tabbing even though I deleted and replaced it with a new field.



Tabbing seems messier with LiveCycle.

Hope this helps.

Karen Claerbaut

[Former Community Member]

It is much better in the latest release but that will not solve your current issues. The Tab order tool has been totally redone.

[Former Community Member]

I found that setting the number of pages in the Master Page, i.e. giving a minimum and a maximum, would take care of that the tabbing order. However, there is only one read-only field that is not behaving, so I will try to remove the "traversal" property in the XML to see if that takes care of the issue.



I will report later. I appreciate your help!



Thank you,



TK

[Former Community Member]

I checked the XML and didn't see a "traversal" property. Where else should I look? Anything else that can be done?



Thanks,



TK

[Former Community Member]

Sorry, I found the reference, but it is not pointing to the field that it moves to. In any case, I commented it out. It's still going to the last read-only field in the page, even though I put it out of sequence in the hierarchy.



I'm at a loss for words. Are there any other options?



Thank you for all your help,



TK

[Former Community Member]

I added a setFocus Change script to set the focus on the first field in the next page. This did the trick, viz., to go from the last field in page 3 to the first field in page 4. However, this is not an elegant solution since I cannot back tab from the top of page 4 to the bottom of page 3; it keeps refocusing on page 4, as expected.



Unless you can suggest an alternate solution, I suppose that this will have to do.



Thank you for all your help!



TK

[Former Community Member]

TK, will you consider sharing your script?

Karen

[Former Community Member]

Karen,

The script was not reliable and I didn't use it. I did find the traversal property in the xml and commented it out. This is what it looks like:





It was hard to find at first, but the main reason that I didn't like the other one is that I couldn't back-tab if needed. You can search for the other option in this forum; I did find it here too.

HTH,

TK

[Jono_Moore]

I've had luck adding <br />b access="protected"<br />to the "field name" line in the xml.<br /><br />ie:<br />> <field name="SpouseTotalGrossTotal" y="165.924mm" x="170.448mm" w="34.263mm" h="4.623mm" access="protected">

[Former Community Member]

To delete a tab stop for multiple fields, the easiest thing to do is to set the fields access to "readOnly" under Object>>Value>>Type, then go into the xml view and do a find/replace to change readOnly to protected. Essentially the same thing Jono said, but much easier since you can replace them all in one click of a button and you don't have to go looking for each field.

[_Ajay_Yada_]

Hi! In order to change the tab order from the fields, you need to hold down ctrl + shift key and click on the field...the field will turn into something else and it will be not in the tab order queue.

[ibwaheemi]

i got this answer from this blog http://blogs.adobe.com/livecycledocs/



When customizing the tabbing order sequence between objects on a form, you may sometimes want to exclude certain objects on the master page from the sequence, but without using the Protected option on the Value tab to do so.



You can do this by applying a setFocus method on the objects you want to exclude. The script excludes an object by changing the focus to the next object in the sequence. That is, when you tab to an object on which the setFocus script is applied, the script automatically executes and moves the focus to the next object.



For example if you have a Button object on the master page that is not protected, you can apply the following JavaScript on the onEnter method.



xfa.host.setFocus(this.parent.nextButtonInTabSq);



Keep in mind that the setFocus method configures the object to always jump to the scripted target; the object will no longer be included in the tabbing order displayed on the Tab Order palette.



To learn more about Scripting, go to the LiveCycle Designer ES Help and search for Scripting.