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delphidelphi-7tform

How to implement some sort of Form Manager?

I'm in the middle of a project with a number of child forms. Many of the forms may be open at once. I'd like to know if there's already something I can use to manage and keep track of these forms, much like the windows taskbar and/or task manager. If not, then what would be the best approach? I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel if this is already done.

Description

As mentioned above, this project has many forms which may be opened at once. I will also be implementing some visual list control (much like the taskbar or task manager) for user control of these forms (or in the user's case, the forms are called windows). The most ideal way to manage these would be to first capture each of these forms as they're created and keep record of them somewhere. Some forms need this behavior, and some forms do not. For example, modal forms will never need this handling.

I will be giving the user access to show, minimize, or close these forms, as well as some other future un-thought handling, like maybe a custom popup menu associated with one of these forms (but that's another subject). The point is, I need to build something to capture these forms and keep them in order.

This will also include some other user interaction with all the forms at once, as well as simple access to each one of them, similar to how Screen.Forms already works. For example, a command to minimize all forms (FormManager.MinimizeAll), to maximize the currently active form (FormManager.ActiveForm.Maximize), or with a particular form (FormManager[3].Maximize).

Possible Options

I understand there are a few far different approaches to accomplish similar results, and haven't started coding it yet because each of those approaches has a different starting point. The options are...

  • Wrap Screen.Forms and other associated functionality from the Screen (which wouldn't allow too much of my desired flexibility)
  • Every time I create a form, register it with this form manager (which is very flexible, but I have to make sure I always register each created form)
  • Build a master form to register its self with the form manager and inherit everything from it (which is also very flexible, but in different ways, and much more complex)

The second option is sounding the most promising so far. But again, I don't want to start building it if there is already a solution for this. I'm pretty confident that I'm not the first person to do this. I don't know how to search for such a thing, I get nothing related to what I want on Google.

Solution

  • The global variable Screen (in Forms unit) does some "tracking", ie