Tab order in dialogs

Accounting programs often show dialogs that contain many controls for data entry.
The mouse is an easy way to move from one control to the other while entering data, but this is a very slow solution. Users that need to input a lot of data quickly learn to use the TAB key to move from one control to the other.

This is a much faster solution, but pressing TAB moves among controls in a fixed sequence (usually called tab order), so this sequence must be the best possible one from a user's viewpoint. To optimize space in the dialog sometimes the tab order must be different from the usual left-to-right, top-to-bottom layout.

Visual Basic and other RAD tools controls have a specific property to set the tab order of each control, but wxWidgets does not have anything similar. In wxWidgets the default tab order is the order of creation of the controls: this is usually leads to the left-right, top-bottom order.

The functions wxWindow::MoveAfterInTabOrder ()  and wxWindow::MoveBeforeInTabOrder()can be used to change the tab order of a control. They work but they have some drawbacks.

• You must write this code by hand. DialogBlocks, for example, does not do it.
• If you want to jump to a control and then move to the ten controls following it, you need to write this code for ALL the controls. Suppose that you have the following controls: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Moving D after A will cause the following tab order: A, D, B, C, E, F, G. SO, to obtain something like A, D, E, F, G, B, C you will need to call the function a lot of times.

Using wxGridBagSizer can be a simpler solution to set tab order. Using this sizer you can obtain the same layout even if you create controls in a different order. Since the default tab order is the creation order you can change the creation order to get the desired tab order without changing the visual layout of the dialog.
Using DialogBloks this can be obtained moving controls up or down in the left pane.