Architecture AI Pathing Project: Rename Dropdown Elements
February 16, 2021
Dropdown and Input Field UI
Architecture AI Project
Renaming Items in Spawn/Target Dropdown Lists
To get the spawn/target object lists into the dropdowns quickly and accurately, I had them simply add their gameobject names to the dropdowns for the individual item names. These objects however tend to have very long names as they are constructed from several elements coming from the Revit system to accurately identify them. While useful, they are too wordy for identification purposes here and can actually make them harder to find and keep track of. Because of this, we wanted to investigate a way to rename the elements in the list to make them easier to identify in the future.
To accomplish this I looked to add a UI Input Field where any name could be entered and this could be used to rename current items in the dropdown lists. Since there are two dropdowns (Spawn list and Target list), I added two different buttons to account for these. One button applies the current Input Field string as the name of the currently selected Spawn dropdown item, the other button applies it to the Target dropdown item.
The following images help show the name changer in action. The crucical elements are located in the top/central left.
Clean Up and Error Reduction
Restricting Controls when Accessing Input Field
I added some camera controls to help get around the environment, which included some keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts however would activate while typing within the Input Field initially. I wanted to disable the camera controller while in the Input Field, so I found Unity has an easy way to determine if a UI element is currently focused, which can be used as a bool to dictate controls. This check can be done with the following: EventSystem.current.currentSelectedGameObject So I added a check that if this is null, allow the camera controller inputs, otherwise, disable them.
Null Input Field Check and Instant Dropdown Item Refresh
To keep the dropdown from getting too confusing and adding weird blank items, I added a check to make sure the Input Field is not null or empty before allowing the buttons to edit the current dropdown names. I also found initially that the dropdown item name would change in the dropdown, but it would not be reflected in the current dropdown selections. This looke awkward as I am always updating the current selection, so it would not actually be reflected until you selected the item from the dropdown again. To fix this, Unity's dropdowns have their own method called RefreshShownValue(), which perfectly resolved this situation.
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