Making ScriptUI Buttons Do Something

[Stephen Marsh]

The scriptUI builder from Joonas has reduced the amount of time that it takes to create a GUI, which is fantastic.

Presuming that I have my code already working without a GUI, I am really struggling to work out how to test and link up a function or other "result" to the GUI elements in the window.

Take for example this code, it is a simple test, it only has two radio buttons and an OK and Cancel button.

I have worked out how to test and return that it is "true" if a radio button is selected. This also works the same for checkboxes. All good so far.

However, I don't know what to do with the OK and cancel buttons. If I select a radio button and cancel, the function called by the button is executed. Obviously the expectation is that if cancel is pressed, then nothing happens.

Do I need to do anything for the OK button?

I am finding it hard looking at existing code and have not had much success with othe resources such as forum searches.

There must be a resource that simply explains this stuff with working examples? It is taking hours of research for me to get a UI element to do something correctly, so am I missing a basic resource?

This is of course just the start of my questions, there are many different UI controls (dropdowns, fields etc)... Which I'll get to.

[Kukurykus]

You probably missed my correct answer in other post: Jun 25, 2021 🙂

Put that in place of buttonActions() function content and run the code.

[Multifarious]

Don't forget that every form-item has a few methodes that deal directly with events. 
onActivate, onClick, onDeactivate and then some more. THese allow for more granular control of what your buttons and other elements do, for instance:

okButton.onClick = function(){

    var theText = "you chose option : " + dropDown.selection.index;

   alert(theText );

}
(more info per element here: https://theiviaxx.github.io/photoshop-docs/ScriptUI/index.html)
As far as I understand Cancel and Ok buttons have specific behavior, but these only pertain to the window, so any script that runs after the dialog closes runs regardless what is clicked (ok/cancel). What I tent to do to work around this is to have a variable "processed" setup as false before the dialog and have the ok-button onclick action change that to true:
var processed = false;
/* dialogwindow code */
buttonOK.onclick = function(){

     /* processing code */

    processed = true;

}

/* rest of code follows: */
if( processed == true ){

  /*application code */

} else {

 //do nothing

}

[Kukurykus]

...and onDoubleClick for ListBox when using addEventListener to enrich a code even more 🙂