TextMesh Pro Input field selection disappear when another UI item is activated

Is it possible to keep the TMP input field selection visible when using another UI item (clicking on a button for example)?

What I want to do is:
- display some text in a read-only input field
- let the user select part of that text
- right-click on another input field (not read-only) to display a context menu
- use the context menu to insert a copy of the selection from the read-only input field

Under the hood the selection is kept, so the feature actually works fine, but it's a bit confusing to the user that the selection disappear when the context menu is displayed.

 

I have a need for the same feature. Maybe a simple property called keepTextSelectionVisible that when set to true forces the text selection to be visible regardless of selection state, and when set to false it reverts to the current behavior?

 

@Stephan_B do you have any guidance on how we might go about achieving such functionality?

 

I'll take a closer look next week to see if I can add a new option for this.

 

I added the requested functionality and new property which is "keepTextSelectionVisible" as seen below.



When "Reset On Deactivation" is true, the text selection is always released.

Double clicking in the Game View (ie. in empty space and not another UI Element) will always release the selection and input field.

 

Thank you, it will help.

 

Thanks so much! This will be a huge help for us. Will this be included in the 3.2.0 release?

 

Yes. It is included in 3.2.0-pre.1 for Unity 2020.x or newer which was published last night.

 

Great, thanks so much. The keepTextSelectionVisible works almost exactly as we need it to. In our use case, we will be toggling the ResetOnDeactivation/keepTextSelectionVisible at runtime to achieve the behavior we are looking for. For example we'll need to do something like the following:

1. Set ResetOnDeactivation to true and keepTextSelectionVisible to false for the default state of all input fields
2. If the user starts dragging in an input field to select text and during the drag moves the mouse over another input field to select the text in that input field too, we will set ResetOnDeactivation to false and keepTextSelectionVisible to true on the first input field.
3. As soon as the user clicks anywhere, either inside of an input field or elsewhere, we will set keepTextSelectionVisible to false and ResetOnDeactivation to true on all input fields.
4. Lastly, we will need to reset all of the input fields so that they clear their selection and are no longer activated.

Step 4 is the one that we are unsure how to achieve. Currently, setting ResetOnDeactivation back to true doesn't immediately reset and clear the selection of the input field - it won't reset or clear until the user has clicked back into it and then clicked away from it. So the question is: is there a method we can call or property we can set to programatically return an input field to its deactivated/unfocused state and clear its text?


Here is a a video of the effect we are trying to achieve. Each column would be a TMP input field:

 

@Stephan_B We are still seeking a solution to my question above. Do you have any ideas?

 

Unless I am mistaken, you should be able to use

Code (csharp):

1. public void ReleaseSelection()

on the input fields you want to have their selection released.