Best Practice for tabbed settings dialogs
Ian Goldby
settings dialogs in Delphi for Win32.
I'm talking about the kind of dialog for controlling a large number of
settings and preferences, split onto several tabs. A typical example
might be the Tools>Options... dialog in MS Word 2003 (though I don't
have quite that many tabs).
The problems I want to resolve are these:
1. The .pas file gets enormous, since all the code for the form is in
a single .pas file. How can I split the tabs over separate source
files, though without using frames, which seem to have problems of
their own (http://dn.codegear.com/article/32047)?
2. Validation. All controls need their contents to be validated. It
needs to be clear to the user which controls have invalid data (and
what to do about it), but we should avoid pop-up alerts. And the
validation code tends to become more and more bloated as the form is
extended.
I would prefer to avoid using any non-standard visual component that
has to be installed into the IDE, because our build procedure demands
that the application should build without errors or warnings from a
clean installation of Delphi.
Finally, the end result should have the genuine MS Windows look-and-
feel.
I suppose I'm really looking for some kind of general framework for
this kind of settings entry and validation problem. This must be a
problem that has been solved over and over again...