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### 10.6 Raising and Lowering

The objects in a form are drawn in the order in which they are added. Sometimes this is undesirable. For example, you might decide at a later stage to put a box around some buttons. Because you add this box later it will be drawn over the buttons, thus hiding the buttons (if you put a framebox over a button, the button will be visible but appears to be inactive!). This is definitely not what you want. The Form Designer makes it possible to raise objects (bring them to the top) or lower them (put them at the bottom). So you can lower e.g., a box to move it under some buttons. Raising or lowering objects is very simple. First select the objects and next press the function key `<F2>` to lower the selection or `<F3>` to raise it.

Another use of raising and lowering is to change the order in which input field receive focus via the `<Tab>` key. Input fields focus order is the same as the order in which they were added to the form. This can become a problem if another input field is needed after the form is designed because this extra input field will always be the last among all input field on the form. Raising the objects becomes handy to solve this problem. What really happens when a object is raised is that the raised object becomes the last object added to the form. This means you can re-arrange the focus order by raising all input fields one by one in the exact order you want the focus order to be, and they will be added to the form in the order you raised them, thus the input focus order is what you intended.

Next: Setting Attributes, Previous: Aligning Objects, Up: Part II Creating Forms [Contents][Index]