Our application used to make use of a common base form that all forms were meant to inherit from. I’d like to get rid of it for a number of reasons, ranging from the need to police that everyone uses it to several annoyances relating to Delphi’s VFI implementation. It turns out that the bulk of the features it offered can be done in other, more reliable ways.
The one that I am not so sure about, is automatically positioning all forms in the center of their callers. So if I open Dialog A from my main form, it should be placed over the center of the main form. And if I then open Dialog B from Dialog A, it should be placed over the center of Dialog A and so on.
We used to take care of all this by setting the base form’s Position property to poOwnerFormCenter and it worked great. But how do I do this app-wide?
I thought of using Screen.OnActiveFormChange, but I think this happens each time the form receives focus. I also thought of using Application.OnModalBegin but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to find the form at the point this is called.
Has anyone tried this?
Well, obviously form inheritance is provided to solve exactly the problem you’re trying to solve. Any solution is probably going to wind up mimicking form inheritance in some way.
Could you do something as simple as globally searching your code for “= class(TForm)” and replacing the TForm class with either your existing base form or a new, simplified base form class with only the functionality you need?
Failing that, you could try to modify the original TForm class itself to have the positioning behavior you want. Obviously, modifying the supplied classes is a little on the dangerous side.