Question

I want my Form1 to have a Options button that opens up Form2. In Form2, there will be 3 Radio buttons. When a radio button is pushed, I need one of my procedures to check using:

if (RadioButton1.Pushed) then begin 

for it to continue with one portion of the code, or if Radiobutton2 is pushed, a different portion, and so on. The thing is, I have no idea where to start. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use this snippet:

if Form2.RadioButton1.Checked then begin   // Do something end else if Form2.RadioButton2.Checked then begin   // Do something else end; 

If this is going to be a bigger application, you should consider creating a global settings object, which can be changed by your options screen and is read by the procedures which need to know about certain settings.

Important: Directly accessing your forms from all over your code just increases coupling. When your application get’s a little large it’ll be a nightmare to maintain it.

// Form2 Config.DoSomething = RadioButton1.Checked Config.DoSomethingElse = RadioButton2.Checked  // Form1 if Config.DoSomething then begin   // Do something end else if Config.DoSomethingElse then begin   // Do something else end; 

You could also add methods to your configuration object to save the settings to disk and reload them the next time your application starts.

Others suggested using a RadioGroup, but personally I don’t like them as a long term solution, because I find them hard to adapt to my personal UI needs. (Mostly borders and distances) They may also become problematic if someday you want to reorder the items or insert a new item anywhere else than the end: Suddenly ItemIndex 2 means something completly different 🙂 But as a quick-and-dirty solution they sure are useful.