Quick Prompts

User-interface scripting for VBScript/JScript

QuickPrompts is a small ActiveX (COM) component designed to easily facilitate displaying user interface dialog boxes from scripting environments such as VBScript and JScript. QuickPrompts can be used with any development tool or scripting language capable of working with COM automation objects.

QuickPrompts forms are created entirely in code and require no GUI-based designer/editor - hence the suitability to scripting languages.

Although scripting tools such as VBScript and JScript are extremely flexible and have found a broad range of applications, one of the main restrictions is the inability to easily display even the most basic user interface dialogs. QuickPrompts gets around this restriction, and even allows reasonably complicated dialogs to be displayed with very little effort. What's more, these dialogs can be built entirely in code keeping the script self contained.

10 Second Tutorial

To get an idea of what QuickPrompts is all about, the following example (in VBScript) demonstrates how to create and display a simple form that prompts the user to enter their name.

'Create the form object
dim form
set form=CreateObject("QuickPrompts.Form.2")

'Create a textbox control
form.CreateControl "TextBox", "txtName", "Please Enter Your Name:"

'Display the form
if form.DoModal then 
    'Display user's name
    MsgBox form.txtName
end if

The above code produces the following dialog:

Note the following about the above example:

• The form is automatically arranged. QuickPrompts automatically arranges dialogs, however this can generally be overridden to achieve nearly any layout.
• QuickPrompts automatically provides an OK and Cancel button although they can be removed or customised.
• The call to the CreateControl method creates both the control and its label.
• Creating a control causes a new property to be added to the form object. Notice the call to MsgBox refers to a form property named "txtName" - which matches the name passed to CreateControl.
• DoModal returns True if the user presses OK; otherwise False.

Also note that this example is extremely simple and does not demonstrate all of QuickPrompts features. For a complete tutorial refer to the QuickPrompts Help file included with the QuickPrompts setup program.

Typical Uses

• Windows Scripting Host Scripts
• Windows Scripting Components
• Microsoft Developer Studio Macros
• Any VBA enabled application
• Any ActiveScript capable application

Features

• Completely code based form/dialog generation. (no GUI based designer required)
• Flexible set of controls - text boxes, list boxes, combo boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, push buttons, group boxes, labels and hyperlink labels.
• Automatic form layout including ability to "fine tune" layout.
• Event handling mechanism.
• Control Arrays (multiple controls with the same name).
• Single Small DLL
• Extremely easy to use.

Download

• QuickPrompts2Setup.exe

License

<span xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" property="dc:title">QuickPrompts 2.0 by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.toptensoftware.com/quickprompts" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Topten Software is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.