I'm trying to merge two main menus together, but am having problems getting the right result with sub-items. I'm using the GroupIndex property on my MenuItems to control the merging/insertion.
Menu1 (with groupindices) is like this
File=10
Open=11
Close=12
Edit=20
Cut=21
Paste=22
Help=90
About=91
Menu2 is like this
Edit=20
Clear=23
Widgets=30
Widget1=31
Widget2=32
And I'm doing
Menu1.Merge(Menu2);
I want the combined menu to have a new top menu "Widgets"and a new "Clear" command in the Edit menu. "Widgets" is working fine, but the Edit Menu has lost cut and paste, which wasn't what I wanted.
How can I stop the Cut and Paste commands from disappearing?
The menu merge feature in Delphi works a bit differently than what you'd expect: it's non-recursive (unfortunately!). That means that when you call Menu1.Merge, Menu1's "Edit" menu gets replaced by Menu2's.
You have two options:
Add "Cut" and "Paste" manually to Menu2.
Write your own Merge function.
I had the same problem a while ago (see this SO question):
What I eventually ended up with, is
using the
Toolbar2000
package for all my menus and toolbars.
You can then download a very nice
piece of code, called
TB2Merge,
which does exactly what you want.
You could also base any custom-written menu merge code on TB2Merge, I guess...
Related
I would like to build a Wizard component, where I can guid the user through different pages. When the last page is reached, an action is performed.
That component should work similar as the TPageControl, where I can create sheets at design-time. Creating that 'sheets' is already done, but my problem is, that the last added sheet is always on top of the other sheets, and I cannot select another one anymore (which are behind). In the TPageControl component, I can select a sheet in the Structure Pane, and it comes to the front, where can I put controls on it.
And this is my question: How can I bring a control (my wizard sheet) to the front, when it is selected in the Structre Pane?
I have to override the TWinControl.ShowControl function. That function is fired when you click in the structure pane on the child control. Then, I just need to invoke the BringToFront function of that child.
I am looking at a menu option on the all commands tab of a TdxBarMananger. Is there a quick way to find where on the menu the current command is? At present I have to open the dfm file and search for the command name.
You can only search for a bar item by manually expanding sub menus. There is no a list of conformity which would allow you to quickly define where a certain BarItem is positioned.
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!
Before Delphi 2006 (I think) introduced the TFlowPanel and TGridPanel, I did a control that was similar in concept. It still does a couple of things those controls do not do, and when upgrading my code to Delphi 2009, I decided to add a couple of enhancements to that as well.
Right now, the order of the child controls is determined by their creation order. The FlowPanel and GridPanel show a better way with ControlIndex and other filtered properties, but I was wondering if there is a way to handle drag and drop reordering in design-time? As far as I can tell, dragging an edit control and dropping it onto my panel doesn't call anything that I can access at design-time.
I was half-fantasising about a way to either detect the drop operation directly, or to perhaps detect when a control is moved so I can determine where it should go.
Any ideas?
Update:
OK, got it working. The container control was already overriding AlignControls to manage the placement of the controls. When you drag the nested control and drop it, AlignControls is again called. I then compared the new coordinates of the control with the other controls in the list and moved it to the appropriate position.
There were a couple of problems that I had to work through (mostly related to the many calls to AlignControls) but the basic concept is simple enough. Thanks to all the commenters for all the help.
You can't drag a control that's already on the form and drop it onto your panel. Dragging is only for moving a control, not for changing its parent. To change the parent, cut and paste.
If the control is already on your panel, and you want to move it to another position on your panel, then the panel can control the layout by overriding the TWinControl.AlignControls method. When a control is moved, its SetBounds method is called, and among the things tha happens is that it calls AlignControl(Self) on its parent window. That calls AlignControls. Look in Controls.pas, and you'll see that that's a complicated method, but it's what is responsible for the layout of the children on a control, and that's exactly what you're planning to change.
Perhaps some of these suggestions might help.
You can re-parent a control in the designer without having to do cut-and-paste. View the structure pane, and simply drag the visual control to the node of another parent in the structure pane. If you have things in a flowpanel, drag everything out of the flow panel and drag them back in the order that you want them to be.
(You can re-parent ANY visual control this way, without changing anything other than its parent. I highly recommend doing it this way.)
You can view the form as text, and move the declaration order around in there -- but obviously you'll need to be careful when editing the "resource" file directly.
You can set tab order in the designer, so you could make a different control based on tab order that works as you want. You can right click on the form and change the creation order of the non-visual controls, but that doesn't work with visual controls.
Have you tried to write an "OnDragDrop" event for your grid component, where you check if your component is in design mode?
I haven't written such a component yet, but I don't see why the event shouldn't trigger.
My aim is to update the look of the GUI in my app. Currently my GUI contains a lot of listboxes which are used to edit some objects in an old fashioned way, that is, user double-clicks an item and a dialog is shown to modify the corresponding object.
I think a good modern approach is how Firefox displays the extensions installed (a snapshot below).
My question is about how to build such a GUI in Delphi(win32) easily? Are there any components you use mimicing such behaviour or will I just need to code this from stratch using panels? (IMO a very cumbersome job I'd like to avoid - the selection logic, resizings, etc...)
You can do something similar (not exactly) with standard components; TDBCtrlGrid, TSpeedButton,...
alt text http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/9585/imagen29ox3.png
If you're using Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009, you might be able to do something similar using TCategoryButtons (from the 'Additional' component palette page). Drop it on a form and right click to display the popup menu, and then click "Categories Editor...". Add a category with the resulting dialog, set it's caption, and optionally set up Items it contains. Not exactly the same, but it might do what you need.
You could also use a dialog with a TTreeView (if you have categories of objects) or TListView to emulate the Delphi 2007 Projects->Options dialog. Clicking an item in the TreeView or ListView displays the proper page of a TPageControl to configure the object.
I mostly agree with Lars, but I would use a frame for each item instead of a panel. That would separate into its own file, and you would get easy designtime support for it.
Using a TFrame for each list item and put them all Aligned Top on a TScrollBox might work. Also see TDBCtrlGrid which does something like that in combination with datasets.
It can be done with existing Delphi controls.
For instance in the TCustomListBox control you can create your own OnDrawItem event to draw your own list item. You also need to create your own OnMeasureItem to change the item height.
In some cases it is very limited, so if you want more freedom you will need to do it from scratch.