QUESTION
I'm looking for a good way to indicate the value of a ComboBox is dirty. With TextBoxes I set the Background to yellow but that looks a little funny with the ComboBox because by default it looks 3d-ish and changing the background to straight yellow makes it appear flat. Any ideas about how to show the ComboBox value is dirty while keeping the look clean and pretty?
ANSWER
Assuming you mean you want to show that the value has changed and therefore the user needs to hit "Save" you could do one of the following:
- Change the border of the control. This might be hard to spot or get confused with validation errors and may well remove the 3D appearance (depending on how you do it).
- Add some sort of mark (asterisk, dagger, exclamation mark, etc.) beside the field. This might get confused with required fields.
- Change the text format to italic. Bold might be confused with default values.
etc.
There are pros and cons to each (I've outlined a couple) and you need to see what works with your application and users.
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