I have an application that uses a frame extensively and needs to hide/show certain buttons depending on which form is active at the time. In order to keep the buttons neat and organized appropriately, I have put them on panels and show or hide the panels as needed for each form. My problem is when each form is initially created, the panels on the frame are out of order even though I am explicitly telling them which order to put themselves into. After I hide and re-show the form, the panels are in the correct order. Any suggestions on how to keep them in the proper order from the very beginning?
Instead of giving the panels explicit positions, try giving them alignments. They tend to stick better than way, and they do a better job of resizing if you resize the form.
You can also try using a stackpanel (or was it flowpanel?) as parent for the panels. Then you will have a order instead of a position to manipulate.
Maybe you can have a look at the DevExpress LAyoutControl? It helps us creating interfaces that always look good, no matter if we show or hide certain groups / panels. It even allows for run-time customization of the interface, if you want that!
You may try to organize them by coordinates i.e.: setting Top and Left. Unless your panels are aligned, this will always work (but it takes bit lot of work).
I had this problem and I found that the solution was to do this in FormCreate (or in a CMShowingChanged method of your frame):
MyPanel1.Align := alNone;
MyPanel2.Align := alNone;
MyPanel1.Align := alBottom;
MyPanel2.Align := alBottom;
Restore in the order that you need - this seemed to sort out the order visually.
Related
Using Delphi 7. There are, among other components, 4 non-modal visible forms over a TPanel (the TPanel is the parent of the forms). I use Show, Hide, BringToFront, SendToBack on the various forms and it works fine.
The problem is that at any point in time I would like to programmatically determine the Z order of the forms. For example, Form2 is on top, behind that is Form3, then Form1, and last is Form4.
Or put it in a slightly different way: given any two non-modal, visible forms, e.g. Form2 and Form3, how to determine programmatically which one is above the other?
I tried Screen.Forms, but it doesn't work -- it always gives me the forms in the same order, regardless of the actual visible Z-order of the forms.
I read about the Windows functions GetTopWindow and GetNextWindow but before I try to use that, I'd like to know if there is a simpler way. Especially if I just have two forms with the same parent, is there a simple way to know which of them is above the other?
Thanks for any suggestions!
Use GetWindow passing GW_HWNDNEXT and GW_HWNDPREV to traverse the Z-order.
You say that you don't want to use this method and look for something simpler. There is nothing simpler.
I have three buttons placed at the right on my form. The buttons' anchor property parameters akTop, akRight are set to true, the other ones left to false so that the buttons always remain at the right side near the boarder when the form is resized. Then I set the form's WindowState property to wsMaximized so that it covers the whole screen when run at start-up. But when I start the application the buttons are closer to the middle rather than on the right. But when I resize the form at design-time everything seems to work just fine.
Here are some snapshots to show you exactly what I mean:
At design-time:
At run-time:
Please, explain what I'm doing wrong and how to fix this so that it works as intended.
This looks like the buttons are being created with their designed positions, the form is then set to Maximized, then the anchor properties are set or put in place.
In design time the anchors are already set and so that’s why you see them move as you want. To prove my theory on this make the form much smaller, run the application and notice that the items are in their smaller design time locations.
An easy fix to get what you want. Keep the Window state at wsNormal and on FormShow (which occurs after Create) do this:
procedure TForm1.FormShow(Sender: TObject);
begin
self.WindowState := wsMaximized;
end;
You will see the results you want.
I have seen your answer in one of those tutorials. But realy dont remember was which one. You can watch all videos, even you will learn more things. it will not time waste all the way.
Link: Learn Delphi TV
Also you can try something like below if you are lazy enough to watch videos. Put this code in form resize:
buttoncreate.left := panel.width - (buttoncreate.width + buttonedit.width + buttondelete.width);
buttonedit.left := panel.width - (buttonedit.width + buttondelete.width);
buttondelete.left := panel.width - buttondelete.width;
I am running Lazarus 0.9.30.2.
I have a TForm on which there is a TPageControl. Within the TPageControl there is a series of TTabSheets. At runtime the order of the TTabSheets differs from design time (see picture).
The order in design time is what I want to see at runtime, at least for the very first time the form is displayed. Why does the order change at run time and is there a way to control this?
#TLama is correct that this is related to way the Windows tab control behaves when in multi-line view. The behaviour you are observing is related to the way selection is handled for multi-line tabs. When you select a tab it is always shown in the bottom row because the visual cue to indicate which tab is selected can only really work for tabs in the bottom row.
Given that constraint the control simply has to rearrange rows of tabs as you modify the selected tab. It's astoundingly confusing for the user. Good UI design never has UI elements changing position like this.
Clearly what is happening here is that the rearrangement is happening at runtime when the form is first shown and for whatever reason this is resulting in a different arrangement from the design time arrangement. Given that the user can arrange the rows in any order just by selecting them I'm not sure you should worry about what order the rows appear in.
If you are dead set on forcing a particular arrangement when the form first shows you can add code like this to a OnCreate handler for the form:
PageControl1.ActivePage := TabSheet9;
PageControl1.ActivePage := TabSheet5;
PageControl1.ActivePage := TabSheet1;
Best practise for UI design is to avoid multi-line tab controls and I urge you to attempt to re-design your UI that way.
Please help me with my question.
I have TreeView and Frames, how can I shift them if I click on an item of TreeView?
Is it better to use PageControl (PageControl1.Pages[i].TabVisible := false;) instead of Frames or Frames fit better?
Thank you very much!
To answer your first question "how to ... using a TreeView?" : Implement the OnChange event of the TreeView. The node parameter refers to the newly selected item.
About your second question "Should I use Frames or a PageControl?" : Well, one does not exclude the other and you perfectly can use both. Indeed, I advice to do so when you use the contents of such a TabPage multiple times. In those cases, place the Frame with Align = alClient on your TabPage.
Frames are usefull to design an arbitrary reusable container. For instance: you could set the same FrameType on every Page of the PageControl, assuming they all look the same but each working with different data.
Another possible minor advantage of using frames is not to get confused about all the controls on the TabPages.
But if every TabPage is unique in terms of visual style or control layout, then it's perfectly ok to not use frames and design the pages on the PageControl directly.
And about the shifting part: I don't exactly understand what you want to accomplish by setting the visibility of a tab, but shifting to another page (depending entirely on your implementation) based on the node could be as simple as:
procedure TForm1.TreeView1Change(Sender: TObject; Node: TTreeNode);
begin
PageControl1.ActivePageIndex := Node.Index;
end;
I'm looking for a way of implementing a sort of inset caption before a set of tabs, something like this:
The tab set is not supposed to be multi-line, will only be horizontal and laid out at the top. However it should be correctly scrollable when there are too many tabs.
I fear I'm going to be restricted here with regard to using third-party controls, but I could use subclassing on the standard TTabControl to add the necessary changes to the standard looks and behaviour. (I don't need it to be TPageControl, because it's only the specific arrangement of the tabs that I am interested in.)
Maybe there's some way of implementing this with craftily arranged combination of standard controls, which, despite my endevours, has escaped me.
Basically, any ideas or pointers are welcome.
Oh, and additional requirement is, it should blend well with desktop themes.
Granted some time has passed, but I recently needed this style and found you can do it with the TMS Software TAdvOfficePager. It has a property FixedTabs, which I set to 1 in this case. It also has an OnChanging event where you can prevent access to a tab, in this case I used AllowChange := (ToPage > 0); Lastly, I set the first tab to disabled.
Then just style the first tab different than the rest and you can have something like this:
Have you tried to make the first tab to be the caption you want.
With some additional logic you can restrict the selection of this tab.
I don't know if you can control the style of each tab individually to make the first one look as it is not the tab.
Here is crafty arrangement of controls that will work. I have done this sort of thing in the past. Best of all it automatically handles scrolling of tabs.