Question

I’m trying to merge two main menus together, but am having problems getting the right result with sub-items. I’m using the GroupIndex property on my MenuItems to control the merging/insertion.

Menu1 (with groupindices) is like this

• File=10
  • Open=11
  • Close=12
• Edit=20
  • Cut=21
  • Paste=22
• Help=90
  • About=91

Menu2 is like this

• Edit=20
  • Clear=23
• Widgets=30
  • Widget1=31
  • Widget2=32

And I’m doing

  Menu1.Merge(Menu2); 

I want the combined menu to have a new top menu ‘Widgets’and a new ‘Clear’ command in the Edit menu. ‘Widgets’ is working fine, but the Edit Menu has lost cut and paste, which wasn’t what I wanted.

How can I stop the Cut and Paste commands from disappearing?

Answer 1

The menu merge feature in Delphi works a bit differently than what you’d expect: it’s non-recursive (unfortunately!). That means that when you call Menu1.Merge, Menu1’s ‘Edit’ menu gets replaced by Menu2’s.

You have two options:

• Add ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ manually to Menu2.
• Write your own Merge function.

I had the same problem a while ago (see this SO question):

What I eventually ended up with, is using the Toolbar2000 package for all my menus and toolbars. You can then download a very nice piece of code, called TB2Merge, which does exactly what you want.

You could also base any custom-written menu merge code on TB2Merge, I guess…