Way to organize messy icons on forms

[Dman]

I HATE MESSY FORMS

I remember many years ago there was a "faux form" kind of thing

e.g. when you have a lot of these system icons on your form, it gets messy.

So Delphi used to have this kind of "fake form" thing. And, you could drag all these components off of your main form, and put them on this fake form. So it didn't look so messy.

Do you know what this is? Do they still have this?

If not, how can i get these icons to stop bothering me?

[Ouiji]

I have run into this problem a couple of times, and the only real solution I could come up with was to create the visual components at runtime, and do away with the icon's all together. Since creating them on the fly can be a bit of a pain, I found myself leaving one of each type on the for to reference the properties from, then create the rest as MyUglyIconVC := TADOQuery.Create(mainform); Then of course you have to manually create all of the Events, IE MyUglyIconVC.OnWeDoneQuerySomeStuffs. Its more work, but usually worth it.

[Dman]

hmm..

What about just making another form/unit.

e.g. just a blank gray form to throw all your components on...

[Donovan]

why not use a data module? That way you can put all the non visual controls on there and still have access to them.

Otherwise GExperts has a Hide/Show Non Visual Components function, you could use that?

Regards

Donovan

[Dman]

oh ya data module

i've never used one

that must have been what i read years and years ago

http://delphi.about.com/od/database/l/aa101601a.htm

so i'm assuming i can just add one of these to my project and then just drag everything in there...

[Donovan]

well i think you are suppose to start the project off with a Datamodule so I dont really know what dragging all the controls across will do.

Otherwise you can make the form bigger in design time, so that you have space to put all the non visuals, and then set the forms Autosize property to true at create and it will snap back to the size you want.

I still think you should look at the GExperts Hide/Show Non Visual Components though if you can

Regards

Donovan

[delphimpd]

I think that with a little bit of patience you can do the following:

1. Go to Options and Un-check "Show Components Captions"
2. Organize your Components side by side in a nice lineup way and by category, for example all Images, DataSources beside the dataQueries, menu componets and so on.

I dont know which IDE you have, I have 2010 in which if I have to many components, all I do is Press F6 and type part of my component's Name and the IDE will find it for me.

if you dont have 2010 or above, all you have to do is hover your mouse and the IDE Hint system will reveal the name of your component.

Hope this helps

Good luck

[Dman]

oh dang i just tried to put all my system timers into a datamodule.

but just realized the datamodule wont accept system timers.



maybe i have to use a form...

[Donovan]

or perhaps add all the timers into a timerlist?

[Dman]

is this a component somewhere?

is there a delphi Ttimerlist component?