Delphi - move control to the ancestor form

Question

I have more than 50 forms which have the same button on them. All of them are derived from the same ancestor. Is there any automatically way to move that button(or any other control) to the common ancestor?

Script up an edit to the .pas and .dfm files – David Heffernan May 13 '13 at 15:34 — David Heffernan, May 13 '13 at 15:34

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '13 at 00:46

David Miro had the right answer, but I think he misunderstood what you want to do. You are not trying to move the position of the butttons.

If you have not edited the buttons on the child form(s), you can add a new button on the parent. It will appear automatically on each child form. It will be a new button, which must have a different name but there will be an inherited button on each form. Then you will want to edit each child form to remove the original button. You will have a button and it will be inherited. If the event handler is always the same, you can code that into the parent as well.

If you have edited the buttons on the child forms previously, you can do this. The only way I know is to edit the DFM file of the form. A button declared in the form is defined without any reference to a parent. An inherited button is defined with an INHERIT in front of it. You need to add the INHERIT word, which tells the form that the button is inherited. If that sounds complicated, just create 2 buttons and look at the difference. It's not really too complicated.

The difficulty is this: you can't inherit from something before you create it (the parent button). And, you may have some difficulty creating the parent because the children already have a component with that name. You can change the name if you have to. But this can be done. I think this is what you are looking for. Strange there's no easier way to do this, because improvements like this are often created in the child form first.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '13 at 18:38

1

At design time no problem. If you move parent button position , automatically moves the children buttons. But if you moved the child button, then this no longer works.

A solution. Although tedious, is to edit the form dfm child file and remove the attributes you need to inherit from dfm parent file (button.left, button.right, etc. ..)

With this procedure get it working again

answered May 14 '13 at 18:38

David Miró

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Yes it is a problem. I know what happens from parent to inherited children forms. so there isn't a way to do this from children to parent, other than making a script. – RBA May 16 '13 at 06:41

Delphi - move control to the ancestor form

2 Answers2