Select Lists and Radio Buttons

Dialog has the ability to take a list of values and display them as a dropdown with optional default selection.

How to Use

--selecttitle <text>[,required|radio]
            Title for dropdown selection

--selectvalues <text><csv>
            List of values to be displayed in the dropdown, specivied in CSV format
            e.g. "Option 1,Option 2,Option 3"

--selectdefault <text>
            Default option to be selected (must match one of the items in the list)

            If specified, the selected option will be sent to stdout in two forms:
              SelectedOption - Outputs the text of the option seelcted
              SelectedIndex  - Outputs the index of the option selected, starting at 0

              example output:
                SelectedOption: Option 1
                SelectedIndex: 0

            Output of select items is only shown if Dialog's exit code is 0

Values are specified in CSV format and passed in using the --selectvalues command line option e.g. --selectvalues "Option 1,Option 2,Option 3,Option 4, Option 5"

A label can be given to the list with the --selecttitle command line option. e.g. --selecttitle "Select an Option"

The default option cen be set using the --selectdefault command line option e.g. --selectdefault "Option 4"

If a default value is not specified, and the user does not select an item from the list, no output is given.

Modifiers

The radio modifier will change the select list to display a group with radio buttons. When using radio with no default item specified, the first entry in the list will become the default selected item. As such, using radio buttons always forces one of the values to be selected and modifiers like required are ignored.

--selecttitle "Radio buttons",radio --selectvalues "Option One, Option Two, Option Three"

The required modifier will make that particular list a required item that must have a value before swiftDialog will exit

--selecttitle "Required item",required --selectvalues "Option One, Option Two, Option Three"

Adding sections to the list

Add three or more hyphens --- into your list wherever you need a divider in your list

--selectvalues "Option One, Option Two, ---, Option Three, Option Four, ---, Option Five"

NOTE: each --- will count in the index even though the divider itself is not selectable. In the above example there will be 7 items in the list array even though only 5 are displayed in the menu. Please take this into account when constructing your select lists

Output

Dialog will output the user selected value (or default value if given and the user selects no value) to stdout on exit. This output can be parsed by a script and acted on accordingly.

There are two lines in the output.

• The first line is the text of the list item and will be output as SelectedOption: <text of item>
• The second line is the index of the item selected and will be in the format SelectedIndex: <index of item>

The index starts at 0 so if the third item in the list is selected, the output of SelectedIndex will be SelectedIndex: 2

Example reading output

given the following output:

SelectedOption: Option 4
SelectedIndex: 3

pass through grep and awk to obtain the value you want to process

| grep "SelectedOption" | awk -F ": " '{print $NF}'

or

| grep "SelectedIndex" | awk -F ": " '{print $NF}'

Adding multiple select lists

To add multiple select lists, simply specify multiple instances of --selectvalues --selecttitle and --selectdefault. The title and default will be assigned in the order they are given.

json format (for use with either --jsonfile or --jsonstring arguments)

The json format give a more robust way to specify multiple select lists using the selectitems key followed by an array, creating the various lists of items and specifying any defaults.

The format is as follows:

"selectitems" : [
    {"title" : "Select 1", "values" : ["one","two","three"]},
    {"title" : "Select 2", "values" : ["red","green","blue"], "default" : "red"}
]

For generating a list of radio buttons using the following:

"selectitems" : [
    {"title" : "Pick One", "values" : ["One","Two","Three"], "style" : "radio"}
]

multi select output

when using multiple select lists the output is modified to allow parsing the various named lists. for example, if using the json above and selecting "two" and "red" will result in the following output:

Select 1 : two
Select 1 index : 1
Select 2 : red
Select 2 index : 0

if sending output in json format it would result in the following:

{
  "Select 1" : {
    "selectedIndex" : 1,
    "selectedValue" : "two"
  },
  "Select 2" : {
    "selectedIndex" : 0,
    "selectedValue" : "red"
  }
}