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I'm trying to make a units palette to help with my various engineering courses. I thought about creating a "meta-palette" of sorts, maybe one that changes on the fly, or one where I can create all the buttons, arrange them on a grid and then export as a palette.

The first major hurdle I encountered and the issue at hand is that I can't for the life of me find a way to make the button's content "stick". Either the pasted content is left unevaluated, or it changes along with the InputField or just plain out throws an error. I have tried with and without many, if not all, combinations of Dynamic and non-Dynamic versions of Module, Setting, Evaluate, Defer, and more.

Here's the snippet of my code:

Quantity; Module[{QN = {list, of, all units}
 DynamicModule[{U = "", N = ""}, 
  Grid@{{"Button:", 
     Quiet[PasteButton[Dynamic@N, Quantity[None, U (*Herein lies the issue*)]]]}, {"Label:", 
     InputField[Dynamic@N, String, 
      ContinuousAction -> True]}, {"Unit:", 
     InputField[Dynamic@U, String, ContinuousAction -> True, 
      FieldCompletionFunction ->  
          Select[QN, 
           StringContainsQ[#, IgnoreCase -> True]] &)]}}]]

I trimmed some unnecessary strings to reduce bulk.

The intended behavior of that button is to input the unit typed in the bottom text box. After this I might want to duplicate the button as a "static" one so that it can be reused later, but I think that solving this issue would simplify that goal.

I hope you guys can help me figure this one out, thanks in advance!

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1 Answer 1

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Unlike Button the PastButton does not have HoldRest attribute. You can rewrite it then:

Button[Dynamic@N, NotebookApply[InputNotebook[], Quantity[None, U ]] ]

Does it fit your needs?

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  • $\begingroup$ It does work, however it leaves the pasted data unevaluated, I fixed it by modifying it to: Button[Dynamic@N, NotebookApply[InputNotebook[], Quantity[None, U], All]; SelectionEvaluate@InputNotebook[]]. I has a bit of a glitchy behavior if clicked while the cursor is set outside a cell, but I think I can live with that. $\endgroup$
    – Juan Manuel
    Mar 10, 2021 at 17:47
  • $\begingroup$ Also, I just tried to convert it to a palette and it doesn't work; either I can't type in the InputFields or it pastes the data into the palette's fields, instead of the working notebook. I'll try to look for an answer or, if needed, open a new question. $\endgroup$
    – Juan Manuel
    Mar 10, 2021 at 18:01
  • $\begingroup$ @juanmanuel i fixed what you asked for. Please describe what is your end goal in detail and what exactly does not work. $\endgroup$
    – Kuba ♦
    Mar 10, 2021 at 20:54
  • $\begingroup$ You can ignore my second comment. What I wanted to paste is not just the expression Quantity[None,U] but the result as if you evaluated it in place, so in the notebook it looks like just kg, for example. That's what the first comment's tweak achieves. $\endgroup$
    – Juan Manuel
    Mar 11, 2021 at 4:12

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