Recently I've installed the new Embarcadero Delphi 10.3 Rio, and noticed that some components on the Standard toolbar page are being doubled. Particularly, the doubled components are TMainMenu, TActionList and others. These components live in Embarcadero's Standard package.
I've looked through the list of installed packages and found some Embarcadero FMX packages with these components. Unchecking those packages (need to uncheck two FMX packages) didn't give a result.
Any idea how to fix this?
This is an IDE bug that affects only components in Standard VCL or FMX package.
Standard VCL controls are displayed twice on the Component toolbar https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-19518
It is harmless, so you don't have to do anything about it.
Which standard package controls will be duplicated (or not at all) depends on the context.
If you don't have any application or package open, you will see both VCL and FMX controls on the toolbar (no duplicates). When you hover with the mouse over the component icon hint will tell you to which package control belongs.
If you have VCL based application or package open, you will have duplicate VCL standard controls. On the other hand if you have FMX based application or package open you will see duplicates from FMX standard controls package.
However, above behavior is not carved in stone. It is just what you can observe most of the time. Component toolbar behavior can be rather unpredictable at times.
Delphi IDE's "code completion" feature includes a second flyout window with code parameters - the one on the right:
An interesting feature of that window is that it is automatically sized to fit the content. What parameters must be used to create a window like that, and how can the automatic sizing be achieved in Delphi (XE)?
I would call that a hint window. Sizing "automatically" is done by code, and not by parameters alone, unless those parameters are properties in components, and the components then take on the work of auto-sizing to fit the content. In fact, that's probably what you want.
You could do it all yourself in Raw Win32 API terms... But it's a lot of work. Sizing a window to fit text can be done, using a window without a border and with style WS_POPUP set, and by painting it all yourself, and using the DrawTextEx API which can return the size of the text, but the simpler approach would be to use a hint window component, some of which will let you size them based on the content inside them. Unless you have a real need to reinvent the wheel, there are lots of hint window components already written. Use one.
I have used, and can recommend the hint window components from TMS (commercial) and JEDI JVCL (free), and they can both do window hints much like the above. The TMS Html Hint and TMS Office hint components are both capable of result similar to the above.
If you need a free solution, TJvHintWindow, built into the JVCL doesn't have as much functionality as the TMS ones, but could be tweaked and modified with a little work, to do something much like the picture you've shown.
I'm working on a Windows Deskband in Delphi XE2 for Windows XP, Vista and 7 (Win32 and Win64)...
I've implemented all the necessary interfaces (ITrayDeskBand, IDeskBandInfo, IDeskBand2, IDeskBand) in my code, and that all works exactly as it should (there are no warnings on Vista/7 complaining about compatibility as others have experienced).
The problem I have is that my Deskband Form appears with a non-transparent band. Also, only certain Controls are displaying (in this case TBitBtn and TImage containing a PNG). I need it to display TEdit and TComboBox objects properly too, but they won't appear at all.
I've tried enabling GlassFrame and SheetOfGlass properties on my Form, but this doesn't help one bit.
Furthermore, the Form itself is exceeding the top boundary of the Taskbar, meaning you cannot (for example) resize the Taskbar if the cursor is in-line with the top of the Taskbar immediately above my Deskband.
I believe there is something Delphi's VCL TForm type is doing behind the scenes which renders the TForm type incompatible as a Deskband container... but this is just a suspicion.
Here's a screenshot illustrating the various problems:
As you can see (above), the Deskband's Form is pale (instead of Transparent), it overlaps the top of the Taskbar (preventing resizing and Autohide triggering when the Taskbar is "hidden")
Any ideas?
UPDATE 1
Okay, I have been playing around and noticed that a totally different behaviour is observed when creating a TToolBar control to be used for the Deskband, rather than a form:
Notice there are three TToolButton controls (with their text virtually invisible due to the Glass theme)? There should also be a TEdit and TComboBox between two separators, but these refuse to display at all.
Also notice the artefacting (the repetition of actual Taskbar Icons)?
I'm not sure if this is a step in the right direction or not, but it might help you (or others) to deduce a solution!
Okay... I've finally figured this out, and it is the most absurd thing I've ever come across.
I'm posting my findings here for the benefit of others (to save you going through the nuisance I've just been through).
To get all of the controls on your Deskband Form to display and function properly, simply set the Visible property of your Form (in the IDE designer) to True.
Ridiculous, I know, but it works and is easily repeatable.
i know that windowless controls are not magic. A windowless control can have input focus (e.g. Internet Explorer). Input focus is nothing more than drawing either:
a blinking cursor
a dotted line around the perimeter
a slight blue tinge on a button
and when the user begins mashing keys, reacting appropriately. You know the keystrokes are meant for that focused control, because that's the control has focus.
In the case of my (Windows®) window, i would have to know that my windowless child control (let's pretend it's a descendant of TGraphicControl) gets the keyboard events. So during my form's OnKeyDown, OnChar, OnKeyUp, i would need to pretend they are going to my windowless child control.
Which i can do, but it is a pain.
But then the user will probably want to use Tab navigation, and i'll have to somehow intercept Delphi's normal tab control order handling, and hook in myself to say that this thing is the next (and previous) in the tab order.
Which i can do, but it is a pain.
And then there's ActiveControl, which doesn't understand anything except TWinControl's. So if Delphi ever tries to figure out who has focus, it will go insane. So i'd have to have an alternate implementation of ActiveControl.
Which i can do, but it is a pain.
In other words: is this just too much work? i'm fighting eveything that Delphi is, all so i can have a few dozen windowless controls accessible through keyboard input? The Delphi designers never contemplated using interactive windowless controls, and if i try now to work it in, i'll just stuck in the hurtlocker?
Delphi gave me the chance of aiding me willingly, but i have elected the way of pain.
Some further explanation of windowless controls is needed.
Not every control you interact with has to be a windows control. It is quite possible to have focus on, and send keyboard input to, a control that is not a Windows window.
For example, nearly every control you see in an Internet Explorer browser window is a windowless control. In the following screenshot you can see an edit control, which you can type in, and a button which (in this screenshot) has focus:
You can see the dotted focus rectangle, and the button is bluish (which on Windows indicates that it has focus).
If i were to press Spacebar while the Google Search button has focus, it would press the button. The reason this works is because Microsoft wrote an entire widget library of controls. These controls look and feel (almost) exactly like the regular common controls - they are very nearly exact clones of the Windows common controls, right down to the themes being applied.
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome also use a widget library of controls. They don't use Microsoft's built-in windowed controls, but instead use a library of graphical, interactive, windowless widgets.
And if you have a suitable development environment, then the windowless widgets work just like "normal" windowed controls. GTK+ is a widget library, and Glade is an IDE that lets you layout controls in that widget library.
i don't know in what development environment Firefox, Chrome, or Blender were created in, but their widgets support windowless controls.
So now onto my question.
Unless i'm mistaken, it appears to me that although Delphi supports a base TControl, (which has width, height, and can paint itself), it cannot receive keyboard focus. It seems to me that Borland never designed Delphi's VCL as a generic widget library. The only evidence i have to support this is that a Form's ActiveControl is a TWinControl:
property ActiveControl: TWinControl;
That doesn't mean that Delphi could be, or must be, limited to windowed controls. The VCL widget library could be extended to support giving focus to windowless controls.
But perhaps Delphi already supports windowless controls, and i just don't realize it? Is there already an established mechanism in Delphi to support giving focus to TControl's? But i'm a reasonably smart guy, and i'm pretty sure Delphi's VCL cannot do what other widget libraries can do.
Which then leads to another question: how much work would be be to subclass forms and such to support it? Is there someone else out there, perhaps someone on TeamB, who's much smarter than i, who has already tried it, and come to the conclusion that it's impossible?
i'm asking now, up front, if trying to add windowless control support is damn near impossible (i.e. futile) - so that i don't spend weeks on it for nothing. i'm trying to draw on the knowledge of a community of Delphi developers.
i'm asking a question.
It's futile to build windowless controls and fit them into Delphi's VCL framework.
You bring up Internet Explorer as an example. But in that case, it's entirely in charge of everything that resides on it. It has its own internal notion of what the active control is, but think about what it looks like from the outside: It's just one giant control. When you ask the OS what has focus, the single browser control has it, no matter which of the browser's subcontrols appears to have focus.
When you press Tab, it looks to the OS as though the browser has simply consumed a tab character, just like edit controls do. Edit controls move the cursor over a few spaces and add tab characters to their internal buffers; browser controls move the cursor to another region of the display.
You're thinking of doing all this on a Delphi TForm. Delphi forms already have a framework for managing the active control and handling keystrokes, and you're going to have to fight it all. If you want windowless controls, go the Internet Explorer route and build your own container control to hold them so that you can remain in charge of everything that happens inside it.
Your container can be a VCL control, but the things you put on it probably can't — they'll still be expecting to use the VCL focus- and keyboard-handling rules. Notice how you can't put ordinary Windows controls in Internet Explorer, either. Anything you put there needs to go through specific ActiveX interfaces. Maybe you'll need interfaces, too, or maybe you can just make your own set of control classes that descend from some special ancestor class you design to work with your container. Don't start with TGraphicControl; it's too entrenched in the VCL to be usable as the basis for your offshoot control library.
It will be a lot of work, but then again, so was Internet Explorer.
Yes, it is futile.
And it's not Delphi's fault, you're just fighting Windows itself.
If you need a control that behaves like a windowed control, use a windowed one.
And you're right, trying to recreate the whole API stack of windowed controls from scratch is a pain.
Yup, you pretty much have it figured out. Using windowless controls means that you lose everything Windows can do to help you. Having more than a couple on a single actual window is pain.
Most of these programs were most likely not originally developed using RAD type tools so had no choice but to re-invent the wheel. One of the largest advantages of Delphi is the deep VCL and 3rd party component support to provide the look you desire.
One technique that I have used with great success to reduce the amount of window handles used in a complex (tax preparation) form based application was to draw the text on a canvas, and moved a single TCustomEdit decendant to the position the user was editing. It was trivial to capture the TAB/Up/Down keys and move the edit to the appropriate position. The challenge we discovered was in drawing a hot rectangle around the mouse hovered field. We ended up with a grid array of TObject, where the array element would be nil (no field), a TLIst (grid contains multiple fields) or a a class that contained our field descriptor. This reduced the amount of range checks we had to perform since it was more likely that the box only contained a single field, or at most 4 fields.
fpGUI Toolkit is an example of what you want. The latest fpGUI code in the source code repository is based on a multi-windowed design. That simple means every widget/component has a window handle, but Windows or Linux does nothing with that window, other that basic notification messages (mouseenter, mouseexit, etc). fpGUI still has full control over where each component goes, if they are focusable, how they look etc. Some widgets/components in fpGUI are non-windowed components too. eg: TfpgScrollbar, TfpgMainMenu, the button in a ComboBox etc.
If you want a true non-windowed version, mean there is only one top-level window that has a window handle, all other widgets/components inside that window doesn't actually exist to the OS (they have no window handles), then fpGUI can help too. The initial design of fpGUI Toolkit was based on such a design. Again, look in the source code repository for the v0.4 branch of code. I that design, fpGUI had to handle absolutely everything, creating mouseenter/mouseleave events, translate co-ordinate systems for container components, handle (fake) component focus states etc... Yes the initial design is a LOT of work, but then you have a very portable framework which can easily be applied to other OSes too.
And yes, fpGUI is fully implemented in the Object Pascal language using the Free Pascal compiler to give me cross-platform support. Currently fpGUI runs on Windows, Linux (32 & 64-bit), Windows Mobile and Embedded Linux (ARM) devices.
I have no idea of what your problem really is, here, but I think this little history may be relevant...
We have an application which fills out a dozen forms. The user may fill out additional forms, and also change values filled out by the application it self.
Now, in our first implementation, we used windowed components for every single input field, so that the fields could receive focus and input. That turned out to be a big problem, because all this windows took a lot of resources.
We now have windowless controls for every input field. That means that all we end up with, is a combined drawing of the form and its input fields. When the user clicks inside the drawing, or uses some keystrokes to move/set focus, we create a new windowed control for the clicked field. When the user moves to the next input field, we destroy the first window, and create a new one. This way we only have one windowed control which again gave us a nice speed improvement.
Again - I have no idea of what you really want to manage. TWinControl is a TWinControl for a reason, but there may be a solution to what you want, what ever that would be...
I think fgGUI may help you out.
Do check its Wiki first.
I think you can use this framework for your application in Delphi as it is written totally in Pascal. Actually it is based on FreePascal ;)
HTH
At the top of the Delphi IDE is a toolbar with buttons grouped together on little movable trays. I'm trying to implement something like that, but not having much success. I've found TToolbar, but I can't figure out how to set up the movable trays. Does anyone know where I could find a simple demo app that shows how it's done?
I believe the webbrows.dpr located in the cool stuff demo directory (and included in all installs of Delphi since around Delphi 6 or so) contains just the demo you are looking for. This gives you the effect your looking for using only CodeGear supplied components. You add multiple bands and set the fixed size to false for the bands you want to allow to be movable.
You can try the Toolbar2000 Component from Jordan Russell or the TBX package wich is an extension for Toolbar2000 components.
Toolbar2000 is a set of components for CodeGear Delphi and C++Builder designed to mimic the Office 2000 look and behavior. It includes draggable and dockable toolbars and menus.
alt text http://www.indasoftware.com/_files/img/fordev/office2003/small_classic.png
you can see these links.
Office2003 Theme for TBX
Mac OSX Theme for TBX
TBX themes
Bye.
You can put your toolbars in a standard VCL TCoolBar or TControlBar. AFAIR this can get a bit messy sometimes. For an example, have a look at the CoolStuff demo, as skamradt suggested.