Question

I have a delphi application with multiple forms. Initially I had tried a setup where each newly opened form was a frame and the “parent” of this form (whichever called to open the form) was hidden as the child was shown with the child being resized and relocated to give a seamless effect of having one window, when the child is closed the parent is relocated and again made visible. All forms have a bsSingle border style for the Windows title block.
This approach worked well for positioning however the issue I have is a noticeable flicker as the parent form is closed and the child opened, and as there is a small time period where no form is opened the icon/tray on the start bar would shift around and itself become hidden and visible.

Does anybody have any advice on solving this problem? I thought perhaps if I only had one form with the border within the application and opened each new form within this border it would work better – though I am unsure how exactly to do this.

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

It is easy to make one form appear as a child inside another. Create a new form which will contain and create your other forms:

procedure TMainForm.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
  F : TForm;
begin
  F := TOneOfYourChildForms.Create(Self);
  F.Parent := Self;
  F.Show();
end;

Create both your child forms similar to this, then just do Show on the one you want to display and Hide on the other. Set BorderStyle to bsNone on the child forms to remove the caption. Turn off Auto-Create on your forms in project settings if you create them yourself like this instead.