Question

Is there a way that I can force the help question mark button to be visible on a form that is not a dialog in Delphi 2010?

I want to use the help question mark so that a user can click it then go to a control, but by default it is only available if the border style is dialog, but our application does not use dialog forms

I was looking at Overriding the CreateParams procedure but I am not sure what code to put in it to force the button to show?

Paul

Answer 1

You want a help button in the top (grabber) non-client area of a non-modal window that appears beside maximize and minimize?

Use TJvCaptionButton (included in the JEDI VCL) on your form, put a help question mark bitmap on the control button, and have that open the help to a particular page, from an integer help context like this:

Application.HelpContext(aHelpContext);

Because it paints in the non-client area of the window, you might experience some strange behaviour on some Windows theme settings; I don’t think Jedi JvCaptionButtons look quite native on Win7 with Aero enabled, for example.

Update The linked question below in comments mentions putting the form into help-mode like this, contributed by DavidH:

  SendMessage(Handle, WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_CONTEXTHELP, 0);

end;