MainForm creates some secondary Frame objects at runtime to display various option panels.
Here's a typical constructor for one of those frame classes (they each extend TFrame):
constructor Tframe2.Create(AOwner: TComponent);
begin
inherited;
edTime.Text := '12:00pm'; //edTime is a TEdit control. this line is where it throws the exception
//etc.
end;
This code worked fine in Delphi (whether or not it was the right way to do things), but the same code in Lazarus keeps throwing an EInvalidOperation exception, because the control (TEdit) has no parent "window" assigned yet (rsControlHasNoParentWindow), which actually kind of makes sense when I examine the code because the parent doesn't appear to be getting assigned until after the constructor is called.
Here is the code in MainForm the initializes the secondary frame:
if Assigned(frame) then FreeAndNil(frame);
case Node.AbsoluteIndex of
optInterval: frame := Tframe2.Create(Self); //here's where the constructor gets called.
//etc
end;
frame := TframeOther.Create(Self);
if Assigned(frame) then
begin
frame.Parent := panOptions; //here's where Tframe2's parent gets set
frame.Align := alClient;
end;
So can anyone explain whether there's any important differences between Delphi and Lazarus as far as form initialization sequence?
And what the most standard way to resolve this type of initialization order problem would be? Comparing to other languages I'm more familiar with, there might be different strategies to resolve such errors. I could add another parameter to the constructor, or if there's a method that gets called post constructor pre-drawing it on the screen that I could override I could relocate that code, or just make a helper method and call it after setParent gets called. Any particular best practice here?
Edit]: It appears this may be specific to TEdit in some way. It looks like the lines initializing the state for checkboxes are not having the same issue. Could this just be a bug in Lazarus?
After further experimentation, I have been able to solve most of the immediate problem of it crashing by adding a line to set the parent of the TEdit to be the Frame (versus setting the parent of the Frame). Like so:
edTime.Parent := Self;
edTime.Text := '12:00';
But I'd still love to understand better why this is "sometimes" needed.
edit: while this fixes being able to set text on a TEdit this doesn't fix the autosizing code I have that iterates through the components and resizes any that happen to be checkboxes. Apparently the form not having it's parent set is still "sort of" a problem.
edit2: Adding a second parameter to the constructor and setting the parent for the entire form in the constructor seemed to eliminate the need to set the Parent for the TEdit's entirely.
Related
Many of my application forms inherit from a base form which loads the saved window size, position and state recorded during FormClose and applies it during FormShow.
The inherited; line in the descendant version of FormShow is in the usual place at the start of the method, and is generally followed by a fair amount of code that requires the visual components on the form to have been created so they can be manipulated and set up.
The problem I am having is that the form is usually hidden until the end of the descendent FormShow event, which is the expected behaviour, unless the WindowState is being set to wsMaximized in the ancestor class FormShow event. In that case, the form becomes visible as soon as the inherited; line is executed, and you get to watch as the remaining visual elements get organised.
When setting the WindowState property of a VCL.Forms.TForm, the following code is executed:
procedure TCustomForm.SetWindowState(Value: TWindowState);
const
ShowCommands: array[TWindowState] of Integer =
(SW_SHOWNORMAL, SW_MINIMIZE, SW_SHOWMAXIMIZED);
begin
if FWindowState <> Value then
begin
FWindowState := Value;
if not (csDesigning in ComponentState) then
begin
if Showing then
ShowWindow(Handle, ShowCommands[Value])
else if HandleAllocated and (FWindowState = wsMaximized) then
RecreateWnd;
end;
end;
end;
The apparent cause of the issue is somewhere in that method; either the ShowWindow or the RecreateWnd, which seems to be triggering the form to be immediately painted.
Apart from moving my LoadFormState(Self); method from TBaseForm.FormShow to TBaseForm.FormActivate, is there any other way to set the form to be maximized without it actually showing the form?
You should not be calling your LoadFromState procedure either from TBaseForm.FormShow or TBaseForm.FormActivate.
TBaseForm.FormShow is called every time visibility of your form changes from False to True.
So for instance if you hide your from when showing another and then show it again after another form is closed TBaseForm.FormShow will fire and thus you will load form's dimensions and position from the saved state which might not be the same state as of when the form was hidden. User might have moved and resized the from since application was started.
This will lead to form moving its position without users wish to do so and thus it will annoy your users as hell.
Also don't use TBaseForm.FormActivate as this fires every time Form receives focus. So changing focus from another back to this one will the TBaseForm.FormActivate and thus change your form dimensions and position to the saved state which might not be teh state when form lost its focus.
The correct place for you to call your LoadFormState procedure with which you load initial properties of your form is within the forms constructor.
I have a frame that is being placed on a form. I expect to be placing a number of instances of this frame on the form.
It has a drawgrid with 2 columns and in the OnResize event I make the 2nd column extend to the end of the available space. That works when the form is manually resized with the frame Align set to alTop. But when the form first appears even though FrameResize gets called it has no effect. (Though it did have the desired effect when I put a break point on it).
So, what I am doing now is calling the FrameResize from the forms OnShow handler, but that is ugly. The frame should be able to appear correctly formed without help from the Form.
Any ideas? I did try overriding SetParent, but that didn't work. Using Xe2.
TIA
Mark
I have solved it with advice from Peter Below, Delphi Team B Delphi member.
I overrode the frame's set bounds. It was getting called even before the component variables were set, so it looks like this
procedure TfaDupDisplay.SetBounds(ALeft, ATop, AWidth, AHeight: Integer); // Had to use SetBounds because OnRezise was not working
var grid: TDrawGrid;
begin
inherited;
if pnlWebData = nil then
exit;
pnlWebData.Width := Width div 2;
for grid in TArray<TDrawGrid>.Create(grdData, grdDup) do
grid.ColWidths[1] := grid.Width - grdData.ColWidths[0];
end{ SetBounds};
This happens in all Delphi up to XE3:
Create a form and put a panel on it. Anchor the panel to [akLeft, akTop, akRight, akBottom], but leave space between it and the borders.
Add a button which calls RecreateWnd()
Run the app. Resize the form so that the panel is hidden because it's less than 0 pixels in size due to anchoring. Press the RecreateWnd button.
Resize the form back and note that the panel's anchoring is broken.
As long as I can remember myself using Delphi, anchors were always impossible to use because of this. Resize the form, then dock it: the window is recreated, your layout is broken.
I wonder if there's some sort of workaround?
Update
Two workarounds are available in the comments, one proven and stable but with form blinking, another one experimental but potentially more thorough and clean.
I'm not going to vote for either one for a while, as one of those is mine and I'm not even sure it is stable. Instead, I'll wait for some public input.
The two options I have used of which neither is really ideal for problems with the bottom and right anchors are:
Make the window big again before calling or causing to be called RecreateWnd();, then make it small again. Has to be visible before you make it small again however.
Set the Form's constraints so it can't be re-sized so small that stuff ends up hidden.
An example that flashes the larger form, use height and width large values enough so the panel is not hidden:
procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
Var
OldWidth, OldHeight : integer;
begin
OldWidth := Form1.Width;
OldHeight := Form1.Height;
Form1.Visible := false;
Form1.Width := 1000;
Form1.Height := 800;
RecreateWnd();
Form1.Visible := true;
Form1.Width := OldWidth;
Form1.Height := OldHeight;
end;
Turns out that the function which breaks everything is UpdateAnchorRules. TControl stores FOriginalParentSize and it's own original size in FAnchorRules, and uses that to auto-resize as parent resizes. UpdateAnchorRules() takes current parent size and current control Width and Height and saves those into FOriginalParentSize and FAnchorRules.
If everything worked properly that would have no effect during normal resizes, as the control and it's parent change size in accord.
But when the control Width is less than zero due to anchoring, Windows, and consequently Delphi still considers it 0. If UpdateAnchorRules is called at that point, it saves wrong, out-of-accord 0 value for original width. After this the layout is beyond repair.
(If it's not called, Width continues to be updated in proper relation to parent Width due to original sizes preserved)
Turns out anything which involves creating a window handle calls UpdateAnchorRules twice: first in WinAPI CreateWindow as it dispatches WM_SIZE before returning (and WM_SIZE handler calls UpdateAnchorRules), and second, explicitly in CreateHandle after handle creation.
It would seem that as long as we can disable UpdateAnchorRules for the duration of CreateHandle, we will succeed. But there are explicit calls to UpdateAnchorRules in CreateHandle, which means someone thought there needs to be an adjustment of Anchor rules after handle creation.
So perhaps I'm missing something, and by disabling it something will break?
Anyway, there are two ready ways to disable UpdateAnchorRules: to set FAnchorMove or to set csLoading. First one is no good as there's code which clears it midway through RecreateWnd and then calls UpdateAnchorRules again.
Second one works and here's a solution:
type
TComponentHack = class helper for TComponent
public
procedure SetCsLoading(Value: boolean);
end;
procedure TComponentHack.SetCsLoading(Value: boolean);
var i: integer;
begin
if Value then
Self.FComponentState := Self.FComponentState + [csLoading]
else
Self.FComponentState := Self.FComponentState - [csLoading];
for i := 0 to Self.ComponentCount-1 do
if Self.Components[i] is TControl then
TControl(Self.Components[i]).SetCsLoading(Value);
end;
procedure SafeRecreateWnd();
begin
MyControl.SetCsLoading(true);
try
MyControl.RecreateWnd(); //or any operation which triggers it -- such as docking or making the window visible first time after RecreateWnd()
finally
MyControl.SetCsLoading(false);
end;
end;
Disclaimer:
I have no idea what else will be broken by running TControl operations with csLoading set.
Better alternative would be to hook UpdateAnchorRules procedure and add another flag check specifically for this purpose, but that'd require either reimplementing UpdateAnchorRules completely (prone to breaking on different versions of Delphi with different original UpdateAnchorRules) or inventing some way to call original UpdateAnchorRules which is usually destroyed by rewriting it with a hook.
When Delphi (2006) goes quantum: I've got "something" that appears to be both a TToolBar and a TPanel, depending on how you observe it. I'd like to understand what's going on.
Here is how to create it and what happens:
in the DFM
add a TToolBar named bar;
in that TToolBar, put a TPanel.
in the code and at runtime:
the panel appears in the list of buttons bar.Buttons[], let's say at index i
bar.Buttons[i], from the compiler point of view, is a TToolButton
bar.Buttons[i].ClassName = 'TPanel'
(bar.Buttons[i] is TToolButton) = true, but that's the compiler optimising the call to 'is' out;
indeed IsBarButton(bar.Buttons[i]) is false for function IsBarButton (defined below);
bar.Buttons[i].Name is the name I gave the TPanel in the DFM
inspecting the value bar.Buttons[i] in the debugging:
it has a property 'Caption' the real TToolButton's don't have
strangely, it has all properties TToolButton's have, like TToolButton.Indeterminate (=true).
IsToolButton:
function IsToolButton(X : TObject) : boolean;
begin
Result := X is TToolButton;
end;
So bar.Buttons[i] both is and is not a TToolButton... what's up ?
(Bottom story is I'd like to distinguish my TPanel from the genuine TToolButton's. This I can do in more or less hackish ways. My goal by asking this question here, is to get a fuller understanding of what's really happening here.)
Question: what is happening ?
Sub-question: is it legitimate to add a TPanel to a TToolBar ?
The only thing the OS allows to be added to a tool bar is a tool button. To add anything else, you technically need to create a button and then put your other things on top of it. The button that gets added is literally a placeholder. It's there to take up space so the next thing you add gets positioned properly.
You can see this sometimes if the non-tool-button control you add is transparent. Then you can see the tool bar's separator underneath, so it looks like there's a vertical line running through the middle of your control.
When you add a non-tool-button control to the tool bar, the Buttons property indeed lies about the type of the control. You'll notice throughout ComCtrls.pas that TToolBar itself always casts the buttons to TControl and then checks whether they really descend from TToolButton. It's completely legitimate to add non-buttons to a tool bar; that's why the Form Designer allows it in the first place.
I suggest you use the Form Designer to create your tool bar. That way, the IDE will maintain an identifier for you in your form, so you'll always have a direct reference to your panel. You won't have to go hunting for it in the tool bar. Even if you're creating the tool bar manually, it's a good idea to make an extra field to refer to the panel. Even if you move the panel around within the tool bar, it will still be the same object the whole time, so you needn't worry about dangling references.
When you put a couple of buttons and a panel on a toolbar, and a Memo somewhere, then run this code in the form's onCreate:
procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
function _IsToolButton(const aObject: TObject): Boolean;
begin
Result := aObject is TToolButton;
end;
function _IsPanel(const aObject: TObject): Boolean;
begin
Result := aObject is TPanel;
end;
var
i: Integer;
begin
for i := 0 to bar.ButtonCount - 1 do begin
Memo.Lines.Add(Format('bar.Buttons[%d].Name: %s', [i, bar.Buttons[i].Name]));
Memo.Lines.Add(Format('bar.Buttons[%d].ClassName: %s', [i, bar.Buttons[i].ClassName]));
Memo.Lines.Add(Format('bar.Buttons[%d] is TToolButton: %s', [i, BoolToStr(_IsToolButton(bar.Buttons[i]), True)]));
Memo.Lines.Add(Format('bar.Buttons[%d] is TPanel: %s', [i, BoolToStr(_IsPanel(bar.Buttons[i]), True)]));
// Memo.Lines.Add(Format('bar.Buttons[%d] has Caption property: %s', [i, 'dunno yet']));
Memo.Lines.Add('');
end;
end;
you'll see that the panel is not a TooButton and most definitely a TPanel.
The debugger showing properties of a ToolButton for the panel, is simply the debugger casting each and every bar.Buttons[i] to a TToolButton. When you right-click on the "Data" tab of the Debug inspector, you can Type Cast it to a TPanel and you will get the correct information.
'is it legitimate?' - well, you are definitely using the toolbar in a way that the creator of the toolbar did not ment it to be used. Will it blow up in your face? Who knows. I guess you could walk through the sourcecode for the toolbar and check if it is safe or not, but what about possible third party tools or components, expecting to find buttons in a toolbar?
I would see if I could find another way of solving my problem. Clever hacks have a tendency to turn out not so clever after all, and it will surely higten the wtf-rate of your code.
Do you have to use a toolbar? What about a flowpanel with buttons and panels instead? Or a panel with a toolbar and a panel?
I don't know whether this question can be answered here, but I hope it will.
I wrote a simple text editor in Delphi 7 that serves as my primary IDE for writing C code under Windows. I run Windows in a VM and I needed something light.
In any case, it uses a TpageControl that gets a new tab whenever you open or create a new file. Pretty standard.
Now, the TPageControl under Delphi has no flat property.
NO I don't mean setting the tab style to tsButtons or tsFlatButtons
the borders cannot be set to "none" and it looks pretty bad when you add a text editor into the tab control.
Is there any way to make a TpageControl flat?
EDIT:
On an open source PageControl that supports flat here's what I found:
procedure TCustomTabExtControl.WndProc(var Message: TMessage);
begin
if(Message.Msg=TCM_ADJUSTRECT) and (FFlat) then
begin
Inherited WndProc(Message);
Case TAbPosition of
tpTop : begin
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Left:=0;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Right:=ClientWidth;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Top:=PRect(Message.LParam)^.Top-4;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Bottom:=ClientHeight;
end;
tpLeft : begin
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Top:=0;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Right:=ClientWidth;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Left:=PRect(Message.LParam)^.Left-4;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Bottom:=ClientHeight;
end;
tpBottom : begin
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Left:=0;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Right:=ClientWidth;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Bottom:=PRect(Message.LParam)^.Bottom-4;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Top:=0;
end;
tpRight : begin
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Top:=0;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Left:=0;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Right:=PRect(Message.LParam)^.Right-4;
PRect(Message.LParam)^.Bottom:=ClientHeight;
end;
end;
end else Inherited WndProc(Message);
end;
The thing is when I tried something similar on the main application it won't work. It won't even compile.
When the tabs are drawn as buttons, no border is drawn around the display area, so set the Style property to tsButtons or tsFlatButtons. (For non-VCL programmers, this is equivalent to including the tcs_Buttons window style on the tab control.)
An alternative is to use a TNotebook. It holds pages, but it doesn't do any painting at all. You'd have to provide the tabs yourself, such as by setting the tab control's height equal to the height of the tabs, or by using a TTabSet. (TTabSet is available in Delphi 2005; I'm not sure about Delphi 7.)
Regarding the code you found, it would be helpful if you indicated why it doesn't compile, or if you gave a link to where you found it, since I suppose the compilation error was because it refers to fields or properties of the custom class rather than the stock one. Here's what you can try to put it in your own code, without having to write a custom control.
Make two new declarations in your form like this:
FOldTabProc: TWndMethod;
procedure TabWndProc(var Msg: TMessage);
In the form's OnCreate event handler, assign that method to the page control's WindowProc property:
FOldTabProc := PageControl1.WindowProc;
PageControl1.WindowProc := TabWndProc;
Now implement that method and handle the tcm_AdjustRect messsage:
procedure TForm1.TabWndProc(var Msg: TMessage);
begin
FOldTabProc(Msg);
if Msg.Msg = tcm_AdjustRect then begin
case PageControl1.TabPosition of
tpTop: begin
PRect(Msg.LParam)^.Left := 0;
PRect(Msg.LParam)^.Right := PageControl1.ClientWidth;
Dec(PRect(Msg.LParam)^.Top, 4);
PRect(Msg.LParam)^.Bottom := PageControl1.ClientHeight;
end;
end;
end;
end;
You can fill in the other three cases if you need them. Tcm_AdjustRect is a message identifier declared in the CommCtrl unit. If you don't have that message in that unit, declare it yourself; its value is 4904.
I suspect this doesn't stop the control from drawing its borders. Rather, it causes the contained TTabSheet to grow a little bigger and cover up the borders.
I'm using Delphi XE8 and the following seems to do the trick:
ATabControl.Tabs.Clear;
ATabControl.Style := TTabStyle.tsFlatButtons;
ATabControl.Brush.Color := clWhite;
You could always use a commercial solution. I would strongly recommend Raize components, which support flat TPageControls with tabs. The component set is very easy to work with, and supports numerous visual enhancements which in my opinion give a better feel to any application.
(source: raize.com)
Drop two TPageControls, one with tabs as Tabs, with a global height equal to the tabs, and one with flatbuttons and Tabvisible properties set to false, which would be aligned under the first one. Then make sure the tab change on the first TPagecontrol makes the tabs also change in the second one.