Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

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194 Day 6
minimized, its icon is contained within the MDI parent’s frame. When a regular (non-MDI)
child window is minimized, its icon is placed on the Windows desktop.
To create an MDI application in C++Builder, you must set the main form’s FormStyle
property to fsMDIForm. Each of the MDI child windows must have the FormStyle property
set to fsMDIChild. Aside from that restriction, there is very little to creating an MDI
application in C++Builder. You simply create the main window form and one or more forms
to be used as child windows, and you’re off and running.
Key Properties for Forms
The TForm class has a lot of properties. Some of these properties are obscure and rarely used;
others are widely used. I’ll touch on the most widely used properties here. I won’t include
obvious properties like Color, Left, Top, Width, and Height unless they have a particular
feature you should be aware of.
Runtime and Design-Time Properties
The properties outlined in this section can be set at design time and also at runtime. Almost
all of these properties can be read at runtime as well.
ActiveControl
The ActiveControl property is used to set the control that will have focus when the form is
activated. For instance, you may want a particular edit control to have focus when a dialog
box form is displayed. At design time the Value column for the ActiveControl property
contains a list of components on the form. You can choose one of the components from this
list to make that component the active control when the form is first displayed.
AutoScroll, HorzScrollBar, and VertScrollBar
Together, the AutoScroll, HorzScrollBar, and VertScrollBar properties control the scrollbars
for a form. If AutoScroll is set to true (the default), scrollbars automatically appear when the
form is too small to display all of its components. The HorzScrollBar and VertScrollBar
properties each have several properties of their own that control the scrollbar operations.
BorderStyle
The BorderStyle property indicates what type of border the form will have. The default value
is bsSizeable, which creates a window that can be sized. Nonsizable styles include bsDialog
and bsNone.