Is there any way to embed a TPopupMenu directly on a form, as if it was a panel always open? or maybe just the TMenuItems.
No, it is not possible to embed a menu on a form. The reason is partly that a menu isn't an ordinary window that you can easily manipulate.
So you need to find a different solution. And there are many options you can chose from:
Using a TToolBar:
It doesn't look particularly modern and out of the box you don't get much control over the appearance, though. Also, I don't know exactly how robust this solution is. I stopped using toolbars many years ago.
Using a TCheckListBox:
In this case, I'd recommend you to create a subclass TCheckListBoxEx which toggles an item if you double-click its caption.
Creating a custom control:
This is what I'd do if it is about a central GUI in an important application, because this way you get full control over the appearance and behaviour and can make it really robust. I have done a modern such menu at work, but currently I am at home so I cannot show you it. Here, however, is a menu I made more than ten years ago for a hobby project:
If you don't need the menu to be attached to the form like a control, but only need it not to close when you select an item in it, there are (hacky) ways to achieve that. But that is a different Q.
In GIMP: is there a way how to make my own custom dock (toolbar) where a could put my most used functions?
Something like this:
Create new empty dock or toolbar
Somehow set what functions will be in it
(any of the functions, no matter it has an icon or where in menus is located)
I'd like to have it so I don't have to search in menus every time I need something. I'm aware that I can make keyboard shortcuts but they are difficult to remember since I don't use Gimp every day. I'm used to this from Corel Photopaint and I think it is really useful.
Thanks for your suggestions.
In GIMP 2.8, you can only customize the dockable dialogs - by dragging then around, and in another level, customize tool presets and make use of the tags in the presets dialog to quckly access paint-modes with set brushes, gradients and painting dynamics - so, keeping the tool-presets dialog around, and appropriately using the tags can give you quick access to these settings.
You can't, however, add additional menu entries or icons to select particular plug-ins (filters) - and access those from any of the dockable dialogs. without rebuilding GIMP, you could edit the XML files at /usr/share/gimp/2.0/menus to customize your menus.
In the master branch, the unstable "GIMP 2.9" which will eventually become GIMP 2.10, there is a "search" action implemented, initiated by pressing the / character that will probably make it for the need to quickly find-out any operations wanted.
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
I hate default select control, that's because it can't be styled in IE using CSS.
This is why I developed a new select control from scratch, using HTML + CSS + JavaScript.
I did a great job in the past two days matching CSS and HTML together, but today I discovered a bug wich looks very hard for me to fix.
In IE 7, when I have tow controls on the same page, the one from top does not overlay the one from bottom.
See the image: coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.jpg
Download the demo page (HTML + CSS + Javascript): coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.zip
Please help me, this control looks so nice for me and I want to use it on all my projects from now on. This bug killed my hopes and lot of time.
Thank you.
If you give each control the same z-index, then you will not have control over the stacking order.
I would suggest modifying your control to behave more like a real SELECT element: only one can be open at a time, or losing focus causes it to close. Alternately, you can set a high z-index when the control has focus, and a lower one when it does not.
Another thing to look out for: try putting some other controls like radio, checkbox, and select under your control. You might find that IE also will not hover over those even if you give them a different z-index (as #grawity explained in his answer). This is why you'll typically see widget demos displayed on top of these elements, as shown here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/
A typical hack to fix this is to use an iframe, but that probably deserves a different question altogether.
Edit: After rereading the question, this answer now seems totally unrelated, but I'm keeping it here anyway.
Not really an answer, but an attempt to explain:
In Internet Explorer, <select> tags are implemented as simple windowed controls, while all other elements are windowless controls (this allows them to be styled). That's why these tags are always on top and don't follow the z-order rules. (The drop-down menu part must be styleable so it's a windowless control, and so it shows under the main part.)
In Firefox all elements are windowless, and in IE8 they should be too.
i have a flow panel that i'm adding extra items to it at runtime based on whether they have chosen to show all the items. that's all works fine; the expansion is controlled by a toolbar button.
the trouble is we'd like the user to be able to move his mouse over the "+" sign to expand the section.
initially i looked at TSpeedButton (OnMouseEnter) but even when it's "Flat", the focus rectangle still shows and so the glyph isn't centered. the main problem with this solution is it's appearance.
then i looked at making a descendant of TImage. that's a bit "unconventional" but it'd work. in OnMouseEnter or OnClick, it'd toggle an internal boolean "Expanded" flag and then load the appropriate picture from a resource. i have a dislike for unconventional solutions like that.
i need to add it to a few different screens so it's probably prudent for me to have/build a component for this. i have JVCL but i don't see anything suitable offhand.
thank you for your comments/help!
I always liked the approach used by the ModelMaker Code Explorer.
For example, when you're adding a new method, some rarely-used stuff is displayed collapsed ('Options and Directives' in the image below).
(source: 17slon.com)
When you hover over the text, you notice that it's actually a flat button. (Except that it's not - I believe Gerrit does some custom painting magic here).
(source: 17slon.com)
When you click this button, a panel appears. Button is still there, but with a new image. You can click it to close the panel.
(source: 17slon.com)
The state of this toggle button is preserved between sessions. IOW, even if you restart the Delphi, next tima you invoke 'Add Method', the 'Options and Directives' panel will appear exactly as you left it the last time.
i have a dislike for unconventional solutions like that.
Over the past few years, I have grown a bit suspicious of unconventional UI solutions — which is what you seem to be creating here. Why not just use a button that the user actually has to click? That seems to be much more common in the software I use, be it MS Office or programming utilities. Also, I'd make the button somewhat larger: in the screenshot, it really seems like a tiny little thing you have to target with your mouse cursor. Oh well, and if I'm bugging you with advise you haven't asked for anyway, why not give it ">>" as a caption instead of "+"? And if you'd give it a textual caption with a mnemonic as well, it'd actually be keyboard accessible. All this should make your UI better and more intuitive. I guess.
I do apologize for not answering your question, but I hope you'll spend 2 minutes thinking whether your users would actually prefer this solution :-)
Good luck!
Actually, I think that using a TImage in this situation is pretty conventional. I have seen many people suggest using the TImage, when either the TButton, or any of its associates did not have the right amount of control for whatever the developer was trying to do.
Have you tried a TBitBtn? I think when you get rid of the text it centers whatever image you have associated with it. I just checked in Delphi 6, all I have installed on this machine, and it had the MouseMove event.