Question

It’s possible to set the Alignment on a TForm, say set one form to alTop and another to alClient – whereby the two forms take up the whole screen area in the obvious way. Is this a sensible thing to do in an application?

I also notice that anchors are exposed on forms – but I can’t think what they would be useful for (resolution changes? MDI apps?) Any ideas?

Edit:
I’ve made a video about this post to make things clearer.

Answer 1

You can use a TForm like an ordinary control by setting its Parent property:

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  frmEmbed:= TForm.Create(Self);
  frmEmbed.Parent:= Self;
  frmEmbed.Width:= 50;
  frmEmbed.Height:= 50;
  frmEmbed.Align:= alRight;
  frmEmbed.Anchors:= [akLeft, akBottom];
  frmEmbed.Visible:= True;
end;

you should comment frmEmbed.Align:= alRight; line to see how Anchors property works.

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If you are interested where the above is used: parented form without a caption bar is an alternative to TFrame; frames were not available with early Delphi versions, so parented forms were used instead. You can find them in legacy code.