How do I set a TSpeedButton (on a TToolbar) to look pressed down? It's only highlighted when clicking but gets normal when the mouse leaves it. I set the property Stayspressed to True and indeed the property IsPressed becomes and stays True, but this state is not visible.
What style are you using? Some of the included ones do not have every effect included.
First, revert back to the windows style. If that works, then it's definitely a styling issue, rather than a code issue.
If you want to add an effect (actually an animation) to another style:
Right click on a button and select Edit Default Style.
Find the Fill.Color property of the Rectangle you want to show the anmimation.
Click the animation icon and add a TColorAnimation
Set: the StartValue (the existing value).
The StopValue
The Trigger: IsPressed=True
Repeat the above to add a second animation with the Start and StopValues reversed and Trigger of IsPressed=False
This is a tough one - the standard TButton style includes effects which work - the button will look pressed when "IsPressed" is true. However, other styles (and especially your own) can be much more problematic. I have found the best solution is to have 2 styles and change the style when the button is pressed.
I found it pretty impossible to get "mouseover" animation to work with "pressed" animation in buttons - normally you want to highlight the button slightly when the mouse passes over and then add an effect when you press - especially when you don't want the default shadow effect but a colour effect (which I prefer, I don't like the inner shadow effect of a default button press), but I always seemed to end up with issues. Either one effect wouldn't fire OR the button state wouldn't return to what you'd expect (visually I mean).
My advice - add a little bit of extra code to change the style for the pressed button, you might go mad otherwise :-)
Related
I have some TSpeedButtons on a form that has multiple uses. In one mode I don't want one button to be clicked so I just set "Enabled:=False;"
But, if it was Down and I force it to Enabled:=False it goes to the Up-State. How can I prevent "Enabled" affecting the current Up/Down State as I still need it to visually show the current State.
In short, you cannot do what you are asking for with a standard TSpeedButton. This is just the way it is coded to work.
When you set Enabled to false on a TSpeedButton, the button gets drawn in a disabled state regardless of its Down property. The TSpeedButton.Paint() method forces the State property to bsDisabled, wiping out any current Up/Down state. In Delphi 5, this causes the button to be drawn with an Up appearance. In more modern versions of Delphi, if visual styles are enabled, the button gets drawn with a flat appearance that is neither Up nor Down.
The only way to change this behavior is to either:
derive a new class from TSpeedButton and override the virtual Paint() method so you can custom-draw the button yourself however you want. You will have to draw the entire button, though.
make a copy of the VCL's Buttons.pas source file (Vcl.Buttons.pas in XE2 and later), add the copied file to your project (make sure Runtime Packages are disabled), and then you can modify the implementation of TSpeedButton.Paint() itself however you want. Just know that this will affect every TSpeedButton in your project.
I am puzzled by the styling of TButtons that have Default:=True. The issue is that at least with some styles (Luna, for example), the most recently focused button is highlighted orange, which is the same styling used for a default button. As a result, I am concerned that users might be confused as to which button is the default or will at least think it odd that two buttons are highlighted. This behavior can be seen in XE7 (and according to a comment, also in XE8).
Questions:
Is this considered a modern way (relatively to unstyled VCL) to present default buttons?
If this is not considered standard behavior I can work around it in my own dialogs by strategically enabling/disabling the default button, but I was wondering whether I missed some setting that controls the relation between default buttons and the most-recently focused button. Is there a setting that controls this?
I suspect that this is a VCL styles bug. Create a default VCL application that uses the standard OS theme. Then add two buttons and an edit control. Make one of the buttons be the default button.
Now use the tab key to cycle round the focus. When the edit control has the focus, the default button is highlighted. That indicates that if you press ENTER then that button will be pressed.
However, if either of the buttons has the focus, then the button with the focus is highlighted. That's because if you press ENTER when a button has the focus, the focused button is pressed, irrespective of whether it is the default button.
The rules are as follows:
If a button has the focus, it is highlighted as the default button.
If a control other than a button has the focus, the default button, if there is one, is highlighted.
So, here's what the application looks like in XE7 with the system theme. The non-default button has the focus.
Note that only one button is highlighted, and it is not the default button.
And here is the same application in XE7 with the Luna style.
Here we have the default button, and the button with the focus, both being highlighted. I would regard that to be a bug, and it should be reported.
I want to achieve the same effect as in Visual Studio 2010+, where if you float an editor on top of the main form, clicking on a main form menu or toolbar button doesn't cause the main form to steal focus; instead the floating window retains focus.
Without this it becomes impossible to invoke any main menu command that operates on a focused control when the focused control is in a floating window - because the control you wanted to operate on loses focus just as the command is invoked.
(Ironically, if you look closely at this image you'll see that the selection in the editor is muted, indicating that the editor control doesn't have focus. Visual Studio seems to be doing something slightly devious to achieve the illusion that the floating window is still focused.)
The solution is very easy if you are using TActionMainMenuBar and TActionToolBar.
First the menu bar: TActionMainMenuBar has a property AutoFocus, which is True by default. Set this to False and then clicking on the menu won't automatically give focus to the form containing the menu. Instead, the form that previously had focus will retain it.
Now the tool bar: TActionToolBar doesn't have an AutoFocus property. Instead you need to handle its OnMouseActivate event and return maNoActivate.
Note that returning maNoActivate from an OnMouseActivate handler doesn't work for all controls. Some controls such as TButton will give themselves the focus when clicked regardless of the return result from the OnMouseActivate handler. But in the case of TActionToolBar we do get the effect we are after.
It took me a while to find this though, and even searching Google for a page containing both 'AutoFocus' and 'OnMouseActivate' elicits no useful results (other than, presumably, this page once it gets indexed). So I hope this answer will help someone else.
I add a toolbar with some standard Delphi components to my application. Unfortunately, the stupid arrow is first glyph (does anyone even know what it is for?)
I would like to destroy it totally, or, at least, set itcs icon to blank, so that it blends in with the toolbar.
How can I do this?
I need some code which can be executed twice without causing an exception. Thanks
TToolButton gets its image from combining its ImageIndex property with the enclosing toolbar's Images property, which refers to a TImageList. To make a toolbar button have no image, assign ImageIndex := -1.
To remove the glyph from a TSpeedButton at design time, select the button, and then select the Glyph property in the Object Inspector. Press Del to clear the property. To do the same at run time, assign Button.Glyph := nil.
If you have a pre-made toolbar, such as TMediaPlayer or TDBNavigator, then you can't customize the buttons. They always show the arrow glyphs that are hard-coded in the control. You can choose to hide or show certain buttons, though. If you placed the control just to get a row of buttons and have no intention of using them to play media or navigate a database, then don't use that control. Just place a TPanel and put standalone buttons on it.
I have a heavily modified control based on TStringGrid. I want to allow the user to make selections in this grid but restrict the selection one single row (the current row).
Implementation:
When the user presses the left mouse button I am using a dirty hack: On OnMouseDown event I capture the mouse cursor and keep it on the current row. The user can move the mouse device up and down on its pad but the cursor will not go up or down. It will stay on the current row. When the user releases the button (OnMouseUp event), I release the capture.
However, this hack is as I said very dirty. There are several problems. For example, if the user presses the left mouse button (LMB) and then without releasing that button it presses the right button, the associated pop-up menu will pop but the mouse capture will never be released. So, the mouse will be locked in a screen region until the user will has the brilliant idea to click the LMB one more time to unlock the mouse. This may be a bug in D7. There is a separate post about it here: TStringGrid - OnMouseUp is not called!
There is a elegant way to do this?
Edit:
OnSelectCell is not working. OnSelectCell event is called only once when you click the cell. If you keep the button pressed and move the mouse to expand the selection, OnSelectCell will not be called again.
Indeed MoveCurrent appears only in TCustomGrid.MouseDown.
Use the OnSelectCell event and set the CanSelect var parameter depending on whether the ARow parameter is what you want.
A nice solution
Check the options property on TStringGrid
There is an Option called 'goRangeSelect'
Set this to false using the object inspector
Or programatically this can be done by
StringGrid1.Options - [goRangeSelect];
This answer is not elegant at all, but it works.
My solution is NOT to use the PopupMenu property of the StringGrid. Instead I implemented my own PopUpMenu property. Works almost perfect. There is on small problem, the bottom of the pop-up menu appears next to the cursor and not its top.