Finding FM's Custom Dialog somewhat, ahh, limiting, here's a way around it:

Duplicate your layout - then change all buttons to Do Nothing and kill value lists - make fields not editable. Group All and lock it.

Draw your dialog box on top of it. You have full drawing tools and all fields and effects. With some effort you can make it look just like a real dialog box (see attached screenshot), but it is not moveable. Use a Done or OK button to go to your orginal layout. Place a control on the orginal layout to go to your duplicated (d-box) layout. As you flip back and forth, it appears as though the dialog box is opened above your original layout.

In my scheduling program, I have a Main layout, and use custom dialog boxes for all others. Hope this helps someone.

If you have many buttons/fields on your dialog, you could also create a new window (with container fields for information/warning/error graphics, etc).

Or, you could cut/paste the complete layout screen into a .gif format and show it (rather than going through the layout-copy and removing scripts, etc).

Any more ideas out there ?

I tried the screenshot - tif approach, but it didn't look good here. Did you try it?

Looked good on my computer. Nice idea and a h*ll lot cheaper than buying a plugin.

No, I haven't tried it yet.

At some point in time I want to replace my current approach to error/warning messages with something similar to the New Window/MessageBox approach, but it's alot of work for me.

One thing...

If the image size isn't a close fit to the container size, the degradation in quality is pronounced (I try and do it to the pixel in both dimensions).

Good luck with yours.

I tried your suggestion with the screenshots (LView Pro did a great job) looked good and worked fast. But from a server, over a network, it slows way down when it painted. So I had to go back to real objects.

why don't use "new window" and "allow user abort OFF" and pause the script??

locate that window wherever you want and you don't need each time to copy the whole layout, that means that is is much more reuseable...

you save layout space, disk space and it is reuseable.