I have this tool tip that is created every so often. What is the appropriate actionscript etiquite?
A. To Create and remove the tooltip moveclip when needed?
or
B. To hide and show the tooltip movieclip when needed?
With these A and B, the answer is B, because creating and then removing an object a lot of times creates a lot of garbage in the memory, which eventually leads to garbage collector calls, that slow your SWF's performance. You can easily go with a single tooltip MC, just fill it with information that corresponds to the new mouse coordinates before you show it.
There is another question, not so straightforward as yours, about how to hide and show a movie clip, either via visible property or via addChild() and removeChild() (AS3 only). If you are using AS2 or AS1, use visible property to hide and show your tooltip.
There are three ways to hide something in Actionscript : Alpha, visible and remove child.
Apha: If you turn the alpha zero the renderer always comes to this displayObject and renders it at alpha zero. So the object is always rendered you just cannot see it.
Visible == false In this case the object still exists in your displaylist. So the renderer comes to the object. Sees it's property is false and leaves it but it still exists in the display list.
removeChild This means that you're removing the object from the display list. This means that the renderer never had to even check for it. Which makes it the fastest option.
addChild doesn't take that much computing power as visible check. I'm sure you can find benchmarks on this.
If you don't have a lot of objects on yours screen and the tooltip is there every second I'd go with visible is false. In all other cases go with the third option.
On a side note, I've found it always easier to manage them with a toolTipManager. A class that makes sure that you have one tooltip on the screen because usually users only use one tooltip. So that makes things easier for me. I just always create the necessary tooltips and add them to the displaylist when required and remove them. (Not recreate them) At the same time have only one tooltip on stage.
Related
Visible in the context of UI-testautomation can mean two different things:
Visible anywhere on the website. You can see it immediately or after you scroll
Visible in the viewport, which means, that you can see the element without scrolling.
In the Ranorex documentation the definition isn't clear regarding this. So what is in Ranorex the exact definition for "visible"?
The visible attribute itself just means that it is possible in general to bring the element to the visible region. If the visible attribute of a parent element is set to false it might also not be possible to make the element itself visible.
It means that visible anywhere on website.
It means if you get visible true but cannot click you need to scroll first.
I have a TListBox that can have a very long stringlist when loaded so I have the operator initiate a Sort by clicking a button. Sometimes the sort can take close to a minute and the operator is left wondering what's happening.
Is there any way I can use a TProgressBar to show that something is happening? If so, how?
OR
Can I Grey (visually disabled) the screen at the start and then color back to white when the sort is completed? If so, how?
Thanks
I believe that your fundamental problem is that you are using a visual control as a container. Sorting the list inside the container will have terrible performance. Put 60,000 strings in a TStringList and you'll be able to sort them instantly.
Rather than holding the items in the visual control, you can operate it in virtual mode. That will be the most efficient way to operate.
If you make these changes then you won't need a progress bar.
on a form I need a first set of UI controls at process start, later I only need a second set of components. I put the set for process set #1 on a first panel , after finish process step #1 I start to hide panel #1, is ther any better way from UI design guide lines ?
I would use Frames instead of Panels. You can design Frames at design-time just like Forms, and then create instances of your Frames at run-time as needed. So create your first Frame (you can even place it on the Form at design-time) and then at run-time, when ready you can destroy the first Frame instance and create an instance of the second Frame.
Using panels like you describe is a very common and very respectable way to proceed. Nothing wrong with doing it that way.
Another often used idiom is a page control with hidden tabs. So, make a page control. Add two tab sheets. Set TabVisible to False for both tab sheets. Then at run time set the ActivePage property of the page control to specify which page is shown to the user.
The page control approach is really rather similar to using panels. It's perhaps marginally easier to work with at design time, but much comes down to personal preference.
I have a TcxGrid which consists of a master TcxGridLevel and 2 child TcxGridLevels (all of which use a TcxGridDBTableView). I would like to hide one of the child levels depending on the value of the master level record values. How do I go about this?
Here is a link to DevExpress describing what you want:
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/Q96738
But this has some disadvantages in my opinion. First it is quite slow with bigger datasets. Second it comes to "flicker" when your master level changes frequently and the grid has to be redrawn. Maybe it is possible to set a filter to your detail-dataset so the details are "empty" when your nmaster has the correct condition. There is a property in TcxGrid to hide empty detail-tabs automatically.
Somewhat out of context but in case the link goes dead again:
1) How can I trigger Level3 OnGetGridView, because Level3 View was not change as I was expected
The OnGetGridView event is raised only once when the detail is first expanded. After the event handler has been executed, the specified GridView’s clone is created and cached so that the event doesn't fire when expanding the same master record next times. If you need the event to be raised later, you can clear all detail clones by calling the master DataController’s ClearDetails method or ClearDetailLinkObject methods.
You can find this information in the "TcxGridLevel.OnGetGridView" topic of the ExpressQuantumGrid's documentation.
2) I am also changing Level2 and Level3 Caption for every Gridview that it showing, but the changing is not automatically, sometime the Detail View need to be close and open again to make the Caption change.
If we're not mistaken, you change the Level's Caption in its OnGetGridView event handler. If so, the new caption isn't applied immediately because painting of the corresponding element isn't completed. As a workaround, you can perform a "delayed" operation by posting a custom message. I've attached a sample project to illustrate this approach in action. Hopefully, it will serve your needs, and adapting it won't be aproblem.
I have a tPageControl on a form, and have made a nice 'welcome page' as a new ttabsheet at design time for the user to start off with. However, if the user closes this tab, I would like the option to bring it back, as it was in originally (much like the welcome page in the Delphi IDE). This seems like a simple problem...
When the tab closes, the original sheet is freed and set nil. I tried creating the sheet again by name (e.g. tabsheet1 := ttabsheet.create) and assigning it to the pagecontrol, but none of the original components from the sheet are there anymore...
I know designing the welcome page as a separate form, creating it when I need it and slapping it into a new tabsheet would work... but I was just wondering if there was a way to do it with the design time tabsheet.
Thanks all!
Rusty
As Serg mentioned, you can just set the tabsheet's TabVisible property to false when you want to hide the page. The page control will switch to the next tab if it needs to, the tab will disappear, and the user won't be able to switch back to it until you change TabVisible back.
Re-creating the design-time tab sheet will be quite a challenge because all the information describing its layout is embedded in the DFM resource for your form. It's not like there a separate resource for each tab, so you'd need to read the resource, extract the portion relevant to the tab, and then get ReadComponent to build a new instance; nothing in Delphi is designed to make that very easy, so you should consider other options.
The easiest solution would probably be to design your welcome page on a frame; I've found frames to be a little more cooperative than full-fledged forms when it comes to re-parenting them.
Another option is to create the entire tab in code. GExperts has a tool to make that pretty easy. Select the tab sheet, and then choose DExperts's "components to code" command. That places some code on the clipboard, and you can paste it into a function in your program. The code will contain everything required to re-create the selected components in code instead of building them from the DFM resource. Then, you can use that function to not only re-create the tab after it's been closed, but to create the tab in the first place. That way, you can be assured that you're creating the same thing both times.
The reason your attempt at re-creating the tab didn't work is that the name of the variable used to hold a reference to the form doesn't really define anything. All you did was create a brand new TTabSheet. The fact that you stored a reference to it in the same variable that used to hold a reference to the old tab is irrelevant. (But please feel free to give that variable a more meaningful name; all "TabSheet1" says is that it's the first tab you put on your form, way back when you first started working on this project.)
Rob's right about what's going on, and about using frames to fix it. Bit if you want a simpler solution, you could try just making the tab invisible whan the user closes it, instead of freeing it.
Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. A couple notes :
I tried the GEExperts option (pretty nice, I havent used this one before!) : however, it did not preserve many design time settings (font size and color for example)...also there were components with glyphs that didnt get saved....
Changing the visibility of the tabsheet doesnt seem to work either; the pagecontrol doesn't seem to know what to display, even after calling .Refresh ...it shows whatever is underneath your window.
Anyhow, I might investigate the frames option, but likely will just move the components to a new form and call it when needed...
Thanks again!