Oracle Forms Developer – Form Builder Reference, Volume 1

Direction property
Description
Note: This property is specific to bidirectional National Language Support (NLS) applications.
Specifies the layout direction for bidirectional objects.
For the purposes of this property, assume that Local refers to languages displayed Right-To-Left, and
Roman refers to languages displayed Left-To-Right.
Direction is an umbrella property that provides as much functionality for each object as possible. For all
objects except text items and display items, the Direction property is the only bidirectional property, and
its setting controls the other aspects of bidirectional function. (List items, however, have both a
Direction property and an Initial Keyboard Direction property.)
The form-level Direction property is the highest level setting of the property. When you accept the
Default setting for the form-level Direction property, the layout direction for the form is inherited from
the natural writing direction specified by the NLS language environment variable.
In most cases, leaving all the other Direction properties set to Default will provide the desired
functionality--that is, the NLS language environment variable layout direction will ripple down to each
subsequent level. You only need to specify the bidirectional properties when you want to override the
inherited default values.
This chart summarizes inheritance for the Direction property.
668
Default Setting Derives Value
From This Object
Form NLS environment variable
All objects, such as
Alert, Block, LOV,
Window, and Canvas
All items, such as Text
Item, Display Item,
Check Box, Button,
Radio Group, and List
Item
Form
Canvas
This table summarizes the functions controlled by the Direction property for each object type. (Text
items and display items do not have a Direction property; instead, in the Form Builder, you can
specifically set Justification, Reading Order, and Initial Keyboard Direction properties for these items.
However, programmatically, you can get and set the Direction property only for all items, including text
items and display items.)
Layout
Direction
Text
Reading
Text
Alignment
Scrollbar
Position
Initial
Keyboard