Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

NOTE
Working with the Form Designer and the Menu Designer
After a paste operation, the component just pasted will be selected.
5. Double-click the Brush property and change the Color property under Brush to
clBlack. The new shape is now black, but it is on top of the original shape. Can’t
have that!
6. Click the secondary mouse button and choose Send to Back from the speed menu
(you could also choose Edit | Send to Back from the main menu). The black shape
is moved behind the white shape. You now have a box with a shadow. (As an
alternative, we could have clicked on the white shape and used Bring to Front to
move it on top of the black shape.)
This exercise illustrates two features of the Form Designer. It shows how you can change the
stacking order of controls, and also that you can use Copy and Paste to copy components.
The original component’s properties are copied exactly and pasted in as part of the pasting
process. Each time you paste a component, it is placed below and to the right of the previous
component pasted.
NOTE
If a component that can serve as a container is selected when you
perform a paste, the component in the Clipboard will be pasted as a
child of the container component. For instance, you might want to
move a button from the main form to a panel. You could select the
button and then choose Edit | Cut from the main menu to remove the
button from the form and place it in the Clipboard. Then you could
select the panel and choose Edit | Paste from the main menu to paste
the button onto the panel.
I don’t need to go into a lot of detail on the cut operation. When you cut a component, the
component disappears from the form and is placed in the Clipboard. Later you can paste the
component onto the form or onto another component, such as a Panel component.
Sizing Components
With some components, you drop them on a form and accept the default size. Buttons are
a good example. A standard button has a height of 25 pixels and a width of 75 pixels. For many
situations, the default button size is exactly what you want. With some components,
however, the default size is rarely exactly what you need. For example, a Memo component
nearly always has to be sized to fit the specific form on which you are working.
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