Modal Overlay Forms

Anvil Q&A
4

Looks like you’ve found it - the answer was indeed the alert() function.

To respond to your questions about detail:

Is it possible to disable the background form, so that clicking away from the alert/popup doesn’t close it?

Clicking the background in a pop-up will always dismiss it. However, you can loop round if the alert() returned None (which it will if you click the background). Eg:

  r = None
  while r is None:
    r = alert("Click OK", buttons=[("OK", True)])

If you actually want to hide the backing form while you display the pop-up dialog, I suppose you could navigate to a blank page temporarily (using open_form()). This is almost certainly overkill, but here’s how you’d do it:

  def button_1_click(self, **event_args):
    # Display a blank page
    open_form(ColumnPanel())
    r = None
    while r is None:
      r = confirm("Answer Yes or No; don't cancel")
    # Display this form again
    open_form(self)

This is almost certainly overkill, but I include it for completeness.

on popup, the focus is still on the background form’s button (the one I clicked to show the popup)

You’re right; this was unexpected behaviour. We’ve now changed it so that everything loses focus when you open an alert. This will go live on your apps in the next 24-48 hours.

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