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Tag: ContainerControl

Tutorial: Design a Control to Dynamically Preview Images and PDF Files

In this tutorial learn to design a cross-platform control that dynamically previews images and PDF files. Files can dragged and dropped onto the control, opened from the standard file selection dialog, and, in the case of images, added using Copy and Paste. The file path will be displayed below the addendum file.

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ContainerControl: Composed User Interface Components

Xojo’s Library offers a good amount of UI controls ready to use: buttons, input text controls, lists, popup menus, progress bars, panels, labels, a control to play movies, etc. However, sometimes we need to display exactly the same combination of controls, using the same layout, in several windows of an app. What’s the best approach in these cases?

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Control Sets and ContainerControl: A New Approach

A Control Set is the feature to use when there are several instances in a Window’s layout and you need to command (or access them) from code, both for those available by default in the Framework and ones based on your own graphic classes. For example, this allows us to invoke a method in a concrete instance, based on its control index, or invoke the same method to all of them (iteration). All of this without knowing in advance, at runtime, how many of such instances are placed in the layout.

An inconvenience of this feature is that you can’t use it when the graphic controls are placed on a ContainerControl due to the way ContainerControls are implemented. The good news is that this problem has an easy solution! Read on to learn about it:

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#JustCode Challenge Week 8 – JumpStart App Launcher

A long, long time ago (1989) one of the first apps I ever made was an app launcher for the Atari ST. I called it JumpSTART. I originally wrote it in GFA BASIC and then later re-implemented it in Pascal (OSS Personal Pascal, technically).

When I got my first modem I went online with Genie and Delphi and uploaded JumpSTART as freeware. Even though it was freeware, I got a few checks in the mail from people that liked it.

I was reminded of JumpSTART when I saw my dock getting crowed. I thought replicating JumpSTART in Xojo would be a good project for week 8 of #JustCode. Though let’s just call it JumpStart this time around.

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