Delphi: handling multiple monitors and TForm.Left relative property - delphi

As i show a form i display it where it was last time using TForm.Left property i saved on ini file.
I'd like to add support for multiple monitors, because in case of 2 monitors Left can be 2500, so the 2 monitors are seen a a single very wide monitor.
I'd like to save to ini file the monitor number (TForm.Monitor.MonitorNum) but to save the relative Left.
Is there a property that tells Left according to monitor?
e.g. i have 2 1024x768 monitors, one on the right (main) and one on the left (secondary/extended), if i move a form on the right monitor 2 pixels from the left the Left property is 1026. I'd like to say "this is monitor 2 and left is 2".
Thanks.

There's no property of TForm that tells its relative position to the monitor it's on. You have to subtract: Left - Monitor.Left . In your example that would be 1026 - 1024.
Regardless, I don't see any advantage to this approach compared to storing/setting only the left of the form (i.e. 1026). You can use MakeFullyVisible if your concern is monitor arrangement may change between sessions.

Related

ANSI control sequence: after setting line home and limit, how should cursor movements behave? which coordinates to use?

Context:
I'm working on a device which inserted between an electronic typewriter's controller and its keyboard turns it into a serial printer/terminal.
I want it to support some of the control sequences from ECMA-48 / ISO-6429 / ANSI X3.64. (also known as ANSI escape code)
I'm having some uncertainty if I'm understanding correctly the standard, so I would like to ask to know how it should be.
It's related to the commands SLH - SET LINE HOME and SLL - SET LINE LIMIT.
For example I could have the situation that I have 1/12 inch wide characters, I want a left margin of 1 inch, and 80 columns of text.
Then I would set page home to 13 and page limit to 92.
(since character positions are counted from 1, home is the first position, limit is the last)
So far ok.
But when I already have set the home, than how should the functions:
CHA - CURSOR CHARACTER ABSOLUTE
CUP - CURSOR POSITION
HPA - CHARACTER POSITION ABSOLUTE
CPR - ACTIVE POSITION REPORT
and others related to the cursor position work?
Should they use coordinates relative to to the actual edge, or to the home position.
So in my above example if I wanted to move to column 2 of the text print area (home being 13), I should use coordinate 2 or 14?
(similarly for vertical position and page home & limit)
My understanding is that these control sequences still use the absolute coordinates.
so in my example I would have to use coordinate 14.
Is this correct?
And if it is correct, this raises some additional problems:
I would have to know where the margins are to know which horizontal and vertical offset to use when moving the cursor to absolute positions.
If a program sets the margins first, then no problem, but I a program connects to the device and does not change the margins then it does not know the offset.
(There is a way, it could send a carriage return to move to the home position and then request the ACTIVE POSITION REPORT to discover the left margin position, but it does not look like a nice solution)
What should my device do if it is requested to move to a position outside the defined home and limit?
The standard says that beyond these limits no implicit movement should happen, but this is explicit movement.
If it receives a command to move to position 1 when the home is 13 what should it do? Move to 1? Move to 13? ignore?
When it is at position 15, home is at 13 and receives command to move cursor left by 4 positions should it move by 4 to 11? move by 2 to 13? ignore?
Another problem I see is that there is a command to set page home, and page limit, but not total page height.
It is only possible to select predefined formats by PFS - PAGE FORMAT SELECTION.
But I don't see a way to select any other height.
If I want to use continuous paper with 12 inch long pages (72 lines of text at 1/6 inch line height) connected together into a long tape then I see no way to define that height so that my device can correctly keep track of its positions on the following pages. Is there a way to do it?
Looks like I had to find the answers by myself.
question 0:
Yes, it appears, that the coordinates should still be absolute.
he standard says about character positions in a line and line positions in a page and these are specified in the beginning of the document and nowhere at all is said about it being relative. Looks like the only role of line home and limit is the place where CR (and some others) returns to, and limit of where implicit movement (like advancing forward after printing a character) can go, similar for page home and page limit.
question 1:
There is no easy way for a program to recognise where the home and limit positions are. As I mentioned, requesting ACTIVE POSITION REPORT can help if this is implemented. (my devece does not support it yet).
Anyway, many programs don't recognise the concept of line home, and assume that normal character positions start from 1.
My solution to this is that after power on, the line home IS exactly at position 1, and if you want something else, you have to specify it.
This way a program can safely make this assumption.
(However after the PFS - PAGE FORMAT SELECTION command I do set the line home to 1 inch as this is what the standard proposes)
question 2:
As above, the home and limit are only a margin for implicit movements. So the cursor movement commands will move outside these limits with no problem. Only the actual page size will limit them.
question 3:
(but I didn't give it a number when asked)
DTA - DIMENSION TEXT AREA is the command for this purpose. It specifies the size of the text area limited by the actual page size, not by the home and limit positions.

How to always show Sirius Label in foreground

For the context, I'm working with Capella, an Eclipse RCP application based on Sirius (hence, EMF, GMF and draw2d). This application is used for MBSE, that basically means diagram representations for industrial systems.
I'm developping an add-on (viewpoint) to display custom labels next to diagram elements. These diagram elements are, to put it simply, boxes inside boxes. My problem is that usually the label text is larger than the space between a box and its container, so the label gets hidden. What I need is these labels to always be in foreground. As I'm more used to web development, what I'm looking for would be the equivalent of the z-index CSS property.
Currently I have no idea of how to achieve this, I'm using a custom .odesign that allows me to control some rendering options, like labels text, the color of some elements or to add decoration, but I dont think its the way to go for my problem. Maybe I should use a custom EditPart or a custom StyleConfiguration (I already used these components for other projects) but I have no clue where to start for this issue.
Any leads will be greatly appreciated.
We recently did this kind of changes to keep some labels in Sirius Sequence diagrams always on top: the combined fragments are placed behind the lifelines (z order) but we wanted to keep the labels of the CombinedFragments visible event their bounds intersects Lifelines, Executions or States).
This has been handled in Bug 564239 for Sirius 6.3.2 (used in Capella 1.4.1).
You could find some hints the bugzilla (Gerrits and commits can be retrieved from the See also section).
In Sirius Sequence diagram , we use org.eclipse.sirius.diagram.sequence.ui.tool.internal.layout.SequenceZOrderingRefresher to control the z-order of CombinedFragments : all the figures that composes them comes from some expressions in the odesign, and synchronization with the Capella model for exemple.
But in your case you want to control only the label, so it must not be dealt on the edit par level, but on the figure one. The "overlay" layer and figure lead might be a good one.
Do not forget another thing: in GMF/GEF, the labels of an element is displayed/shown/rendered/visible if it fits to the visible area of the parent container: in the case of a node in a container with scrollbar, the visible are will impact the visibility of the sub nodes (extended to their border nodes, edges, labels, ...)
Regards
Maxime

What TeeChart Tool can I use to Interactively select points from a FastLine Graph

While using Delphi Seattle 10 and Steema TeeChart Pro VCL FMX 2016.18, I am looking to Highlight a Selection of a Line Graph (multiple series) in the way that Zooming allows / makes a square around a highlighted selection of a Line Graph to indicate which part of it to zoom into (as long as the onmousedown action is in progress).
The purpose of this would be to allow the selection to remain highlighted while the mouse is no longer being clicked, to potentially "Delete" the highlighted Data points. All I need this for is to obtain the (X0 Y0 X1 Y1) values to possibly obtain the CalcPosPoint(X) and remove all the points inside. The data is currently obtained through a Record Struct (Memory Mapped) file, and it will there for be used to set/check for a property "deleted" to indicate on the next redraw of the graph which rows to completely ignore and which to continue printing.
I hope to be able to do this (select from 1 chart), and have it simultaneously draw on multiple graphs. I have tried to look for an example of this feature through the use of TSelectorTool (FMXTee). One of the pages I found referring to such a tool is Interactive data point selection as well as Multiple selections with Selector Tool
And my second question has to do with TeeCharts directly. Where would I find fmx240.bpl as TeeChart_Pro_Firemonkey_Demo.exe requires this file in order to run? I did manage to copy vcl240.bpl from "Embarcadero\Studio\18.0\bin" and put it into "Embarcadero\Studio\17.0\bin"
[Edited]
I have managed to capture / create a sample code (MVCE) from which I can now select a portion and create a square around a particular sample of graph lines.
The control graph right now is the bottom graph (Chart5). If anyone is interested in seeing the code, I have put up a pastebin sample.
PasteBin Sample Code
And a TeeCharts.tar.gz is accessible to anyone who wishes to see a sample of the code, as well as the data sample.
filetolink.com Source Files
I no longer feel the need for mathematical equation to differentiate the top graphs from the bottom (because the bottom axes are automatic where as the top are defined). I intend to only use the space which is adherent to the visible space, and do not intend to extend in either direction (left or right). That means at this point the size of the graph does not matter, because once I over populate the charts above, the position in the bottom graph would become irrelevant, and therefor I do not intend to use the bottom chart.
The next step is to save the positions of the boxes so that they can reappear when the graph is shift from left (past data) to the right (live data). And then uses the buttons above to make the appropriate action to the graphs.
I would like to know what way would be the most sufficient way to record the positions of the rectangles, so when the chart is shifted (via the ScrollBar1), the rectangles are moving with the direction of the scrollbar. But I'm sure I can achieve that.
I think I have found a solution. The red squares are only prevalent for the visual aspect, they can be drawn on, I don't need to do anything special with each chart, as I already know what the X0..Y1 parameters are, they are known from the initial chart. The problem h/e has to do with the initial chart. As long as the screens are all full, I can zoom in correctly w/ alignment with on all the charts (ZoomRect/Rectf(X0..Y1))
But what kind of equation would it take to adjust the charts that are not in the same zoom / max / min when the Chart5.Axes.Bottom.Automatic = True?
From there I just simply have to disable the immediate zoom feature, and allow buttons to become functional, to decide what the next course of action would be.

Find available grid position

I'm building a color box connecting game with objective-C and trying to figure out how to find the correct position when a block of boxes is placed incorrectly over another block of boxes.
See the attach image. In the image, you only need to move the left box one step to the right in order to connect the boxes and win.
However, if you place the left box on top of the other box (Image 2), I want to move it to the closest available free grid position.
This would be easy if the box was a simple square (a 1x1 grid, 2x2 grid, etc), but since the boxes can be complex, It's harder. There might also be a lot of boxes on the grid.
Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
If you're new to heuristics like this, just take the KISS approach.
It couldn't be easier...
The user tries the object at x,y ok?
It does not "fit" there.
So, simply "spiral" outwards, trying it in other possible places.
Just keep trying until you find one where it fits.
234
915
876
so that's like "radius 1", you see? then try "radius 2"
and so on.
It's that easy. Just keep trying until you find one that "does work".
Work from the start position outwards, so that, you find the closest one.

What is the meaning of "topmost" in the alMostTop alignment in TAlignLayout?

In the documentation for TAlignLayout, a type which addresses visual alignment settings for FireMonkey controls, I'm trying to figure out the difference between the alTop and alMostTop constants, the only difference is that the definition of alMostTop contains the phrase "set to be the topmost".
(The same goes for the constants alMostLeft, alMostRight and alMostBottom, which are distinguished from alLeft, alRight and alBottom with similar phrases using the words
"leftmost", "rightmost" and "bottommost".)
I don't know what "set to be the topmost" means, and none of the guesses I make seem to fit with observed FireMonkey behaviour:
If it means displaying that control on top (at the front of the display) relative to its siblings, then what does leftmost mean?
If "leftmost" means it is the sibling shown furthest to the left, out of all siblings that have a alLeft alignment, then why does the CustomListBox demo use a layout with two elements that have a alMostLeft alignment? How does it decide to place the two elements that particular way round?
The Embarcadero forums don't shed any light on this either.
[Update]
To be clear, experiments do indeed suggest that with two components aligned to the top, you can choose which one is to be further up the screen by setting that one to have alMostTop, and the other to alTop.
However, I thought of another possibility: suppose you have two child components, one to be aligned at the left, another aligned at the top. Then they will fight for ownership of the top-left corner. Experiments seem to suggest that some influence can be obtained by choosing between alTop and alMostLeft alignments for the two controls vs alMostTop and alLeft alignments. I can't see exactly what is going on here, and it's not clear in the documentation. It's also not clear what should/might happen if two child controls are both set to alMostTop.
When you have 2 (or more) controls aligned to top, the alMostTop will be on the top of all others. Same wise with alMostRight, alMostLeft, and alMostBottom.

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