Question

I’m trying to get something very subtle to work, it looks pretty awful right now. I’m trying to paint the background of a TGroupBox which I have overloaded the paint function of so that the corners are show through to their parent object. I’ve got a bunch of nested group boxes that look very decent without XPThemes.

Is there a way to paint part of a background transparent at runtime. I’m programming the form generator, not using Delphi design view.

Answer 1

I’m trying to duplicate this problem with the following steps:

1 – Set theme to Windows XP default

2 – Drop a TGroupBox on an empty form (align = alNone)

3 – Drop two TGroupBoxes inside the first one, with align = alBottom and align = alClient

But visually it looks just fine for me.

Can you provide some more info on exactly how you’ve designed the form? Some code pasted from the .DFM would be fine.

Here’s the relevant part of my DFM:

  object GroupBox1: TGroupBox     Left = 64     Top = 56     Width = 481     Height = 361     Margins.Left = 10     Caption = 'GroupBox1'     ParentBackground = False     TabOrder = 0     object GroupBox2: TGroupBox       Left = 2       Top = 254       Width = 477       Height = 105       Align = alBottom       Caption = 'GroupBox2'       TabOrder = 0     end     object GroupBox3: TGroupBox       Left = 2       Top = 15       Width = 477       Height = 239       Align = alClient       Caption = 'GroupBox3'       TabOrder = 1     end   end