I’d like to highlight my toolbar icons when their associated action has it’s checked

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Asked: May 19, 20262026-05-19T21:58:19+00:00 2026-05-19T21:58:19+00:00

I’d like to highlight my toolbar icons when their associated action has it’s checked

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I’d like to highlight my toolbar icons when their associated action has it’s “checked” property set to true. I’d like to do it in a manner similar to how Microsoft Office 2003 did it, e.g. see the Bold and Align Left icons in this image:

Toolbar example

The image is drawn with a box around it and the background has been changed to orange.

How could I implement this using Delphi 2009?

As a bonus, is there also a way to do the same thing with the icon in the menu for the associated item? e.g. as below with the Ruler and Markup entries:

Menu example

Followup:

Thank you Andreas, for what is a simple and correct answer to my question. As a Delphi 4 programmer converted to Delphi 2009, I was not familiar enough with the VCL additions of Delphi 5 to 7, so the TActionManager, TActionToolbar and their workings were not in my Delphi vocabulary. And this is based on Delphi’s ability to use a style that is akin to a Microsoft O/S’s theme.

However, with your answer, and a bit of research using it, I confirm that I do not want to do this in this manner. An illuminating Embarcadero thread re: Popup menus: “Checked” items with icon no longer shown as sunken? with Peter Below contributing his expertise, made me realize that I don’t want to change to the XP theme at all, since that will do baaaaad things to Vista and Windows 7 users, taking them back to the Bronze Age.

The true culprit here is that there are certain things that the O/S themes want you to respect. Delphi tries to follow the rules. I can go back to XP, the XP style/theme, and the XP Color Map. In this mode, checked items will be hilighted. And this is really all I wanted – to highlight the checked items. I used Office 2003 as an example, because it was the sort of hilighting I wanted. But I really didn’t want to entirely change themes and force an entire new look on my program. It would especially make things look unnatural for Vista and Windows 7 users.

What would be ideal is if I could have another set of Images that would apply when the object is Checked … but there is not a “CheckedImages” property. Or a way of programmatically or automatically modifying the image if it is checked (e.g. like disabled images get a grayscale version of their enabled image).

I still wouldn’t mind hearing from anyone if there are any ways to implement this or something else that might work equally well, without changing the entire look of my program.