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Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

How would I align something like this:

Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 1:21 am

This is when you need to use panels to help. Here is the result:

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

align="chaotic neutral" ;)

One thing I find annoying (or lacking) in Delphi/C++Builder which would be nice to see automatic in zeus is sure you can do the panel / align left, right, client, but you can't do width = 33% and have them proportionally resize... always the left and right stay the same size while the client one gets much bigger.

Some kinda percentile widths would be nice to have if it's not too annoying to code (heh, I gave up bothering with my C++Builder appz because it was annoying to code).

Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 5:13 pm

It's pretty complex to code, and it interfers with the existing Delphi anchoring and alignment. But I think I have a trick that I working on...

I've got a set of "splitter" components that I'm adapting for Zeus because the default <SPLITTER> (which wraps the Delphi TSplitter component) basically doesn't work in any useful way. One of the properties of these new splitter components is the ability to handle proportional resizing and percentage sizing.

So, what you would end up doing is something like this:

<Left Control/>
<SPLITTER Percentage='33' Proportional='true'/>
<Right Control/>

Or something close to that. I don't have this implemented yet, but that is what I am thinking. The Splitter will take the control just before it and the control just after it and put them into the two panels used by the splitter.

So now the only trick is finding a way to hide the splitter itself so that it looks like you just have two panels with proportional alignment. I'm hoping that I can find a way to do that.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

How would this work with 3 or more items in a row? Would the splitter component try to cascade the percentage being as it looks at the before and after controls?

Adept Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Posts: 268 Location: Canada

Panels..reminds me of java...Man laying out stuff in java is !fun...perhaps we'll see a Gui programer to help develop zeus apps one day?

Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 11:48 pm

The splitter control will take the control before it and the control after it and encapsulate them into a new panel that is "client" aligned, with the two controls aligned within this panel with a splitter between them.

Now, if you want multiple controls where the first control is 10%, the second is 30% and the third is 60%, for example, then my guess is that you will need to do something like this:

<control1/>
<splitter1 percentage='10' proportional='true'/>
<control2/>
<splitter2 percentage='40' proportional='true'/>
<control3/>

The first splitter (splitter1) takes the control before (control1) and control after (control2) and puts them into a panel with a splitter between them, giving control1 10% of the space.

The second splitter (splitter2) takes the control before (which is now a panel containing a splitter and the other 2 controls) and creates a new panel where the first control has 40% of the space, and the remaining control (control3) has 60%.

But I'm just speculating. Until I actually implement this and find out how the 3rd party splitter component really works, I won't really know how this will work. As always my goal is to make it straightforward and as easy as possible.

And yes, a GUI (or IDE) is on my list for the far future if Zeus does well. But I'm trying to make the XML code easy to understand. It is certainly not going to be as much of a pain as it is in Java. Fun = Not!. I'm trying to make it so that the simple XML does what you'd expect as a default, and then if you want to tweak it you can do that with more complicated properties.