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When editing Answer lists and Scales you can choose between three editing modes:
- The ActiveX answer list (you will need to download an ActiveX plug-in).
- The DHTML answer list.
- The Silverlight answer list.
Click on the Answerlist Mode button and select the desired mode from the drop-down (the currently selected mode is ticked). The ActiveX answer list is the default answer list if your browser supports ActiveX - . If your browser does not support ActiveX, a warning will be displayed and you will have a choice of either downloading the ActiveX FlexiGrid component, or switching to one of the other modes.
The ActiveX input mode supports long answer lists. However if the answer list contains several hundred items, you are recommended to use the Silverlight mode or the Table lookup functionality that Database Designer offers.
Figure 1 - ActiveX answer list
The DHTML answer list does not require any plug-in downloads. The only difference between the performance of this answer list and the performance of the ActiveX answer list is that when you paste longer answer lists into DHTML, the system will be slightly slower. However, this will only occur when new rows are added, not when reopening an existing list. This input mode does not support very long answer lists.
Note: A maximum of 100 items can be added to an answer list. An error message will be displayed if you attempt to add more.
Note: If you have problems pasting answer lists into Authoringwhen using Internet Explorer as your browser, go to Tools > Internet Options > Security tab, select the Trusted Sites zone and click on the Custom Level button. In the selection dialog, scroll down to the Scripting section and ensure that Allow Programmatic Clipboard Access is set to Enable.
In the picture below, the DHTML answer list and WYSIWYG editing mode are selected. If you want to remove one or more of the columns in the answer table, open the View drop-down and deselect the appropriate rows.
Figure 2 - DHTML answer list
To copy and paste several elements from the DHTML answer list component, select the elements by ticking the checkboxes next to them, and then right-click and select Copy or press Ctrl+C - . To paste these answers into another answer list, use right-click Paste or Ctrl+V.
Figure 3 - Copying rows in a DHTML answer list
Set Row Height opens a pop-up window in which you can define the height of the answer cell in edit mode.
The Silverlight answer list - - requires you to download and install the Silverlight application from Microsoft. Silverlight is a free plug-in, and is Microsoft’s framework for creating rich Internet applications. It enables a more Excel-like navigation/user interface for the answer list, which supports handling long lists, the same copy/paste operations as in Excel etc. Note that Silverlight supports Japanese characters.
Note: If you select one or more cells and click Clear, any text in the selected cells will be cleared whilst text in cells that have not been selected will not be cleared. If you select one or more cells and click Delete rows, the entire row(s) containing the selected cell(s) will be deleted.
Figure 4 - The Silverlight answer list
For more details about answer lists and answer list properties, click here.