Nou în RAD Studio 10.4 VCL Per-Control Styles
In the past, the VCL library allowed a developer to select one style (or no style) for the entire application. Starting with RAD Studio 10.4 VCL library will allow you to use multiple VCL styles at the same time in different forms of your applications, or even different controls of the same form. You can also mixed styles of elements (controls and form) and elements using the Windows default platform theme. This feature is controlled by a new StyleName property for the TControl class. This property takes as value the name of one of the styles active for the application and applies the style to the given control. If the property is empty, the parent control style is used: so if you set the property for a form, all controls in the form take the form style by default. A Quick Demo As the name implies, per-control styling allows a developer to apply different styles for controls and forms in the same application. To start, you need to add multiple styles to an application, and you can use all of them. This feature works only if one of the VCL Styles is active. First, add multiple styles to an app (hint, in RAD Studio 10.4 VCL you can use the new high-dpi styles, that’s for another blog post): Now set different styles names for different controls in a form, like in the following DFM file (I kept only key relevant properties here): object Form2: TForm2 StyleName = ‘Sky’ object Panel1: TPanel StyleName = ‘Light’ object Button1: TButton… object Button3: TButton StyleName = ‘Sky’ end end object Button2: TButton StyleName = ‘Windows’ end object Button4: TButton StyleName = ‘Luna’ end object Button5: TButton StyleName = ‘Aqua Graphite’ endend Notice that Button1 takes the hosting panel style, while Button2 resets the style to the form one. Finally, ‘Windows’ is a special purpose value, as described below. With this code, here is the UI of a form with 5 buttons using 5 different styles: A Few Rules for RAD Studio 10.4 VCL There are different approaches you can use to to adjust the style of the different forms and controls of a VCL application: 1. Adjust style list in project options (but you can also load styles at runtime). 2. Use the TControl.StyleName property to define the specific style for each control or each form. The StyleName value must be one of the names of the styles in the project options. A control can use the StyleName defined for its parent control, so you can set the StyleName property of a form to have specific style used by all controls on it. Additional cases: By default, TControl.StyleName is empty and control uses a default style. You can set StyleName as ‘Windows’ to disable applying any style for control or form. If you set a style name that is not among the loaded VCL styles, then the control will use default style. 3. You can define a specific style also for common dialogs. Use the property TStyleManager.DialogsStyleName for that. By default, it is empty and common dialogs use the default style of the application. 4. You can define the application style as ‘Windows’. This means that if some control or form has an empty StyleName property, then it will always use ‘Windows’ style and VCL Style will be always […]
