Color Selection in DriveWorks Solo

I’ve done some research. Even though all pictures from 1903 are in black and white, there were actually eight colors back then! Red, yellow, blue, green, orange, brown, purple, and black. If life would have stayed like that everything would be simpler.

Sadly, someone let the hippies have their way, and now there are many more colors. Most I have no idea what they look like by name alone. Thus if you give me a simple list of colors it has little value to me.

My challenge was that I wanted to be able to let my user choose between a very large list of colors in DriveWorks Solo.

Nice, pretty, but what color is sienna?

Here was my solution.

I set the background color property of the list control to be equal to the color chosen. The default background color for all controls is white. (I know that color!)

See that little gray dot next to the color in the image above? That means the property is static and cannot be changed by a rule, but if you double click on the gray dot, you can create a rule to connect the background color to the color chosen. Like this:

Now when you change the color in the list box, the background color will dynamically change!

This works pretty good, unless the user chooses black, then you can’t see the text.

A second option would be to add a little picture box near your drop down, and just like before, link the background color to the chosen color value.

Parting tip: This doesn’t work for every color ever named. Ensure your drop list contains only colors listed in the DriveWorks Solo color web tab –even DriveWorks knows only a finite number of colors.