Folks:

Anyone have any insight into the following behavior -- what causes it,
how to prevent it, does it imply some underlying instability that could
impact an application (not just the IDE?

Symptom:
--------

Frame with certain components when placed on Form in IDE will thereafter
cause a lot of needless window repainting (including other applications
and desktop) whenever that form is moved, sized etc.

To Reproduce:
-------------

1. Create a TFrame. Drop a TTable on it. (Or several tables for
increased symptoms).

2. Create Form1, drop a Panel on it.

3. Drop Frame into the Panel

Observe IDE and other Apps windows when moving or sizing Form1. What I
see is that every window and the desktop are redrawn... possibly many
times over, and increasing according to the number of TTables.

Depending on sequence of fiddling, it's possible to get the IDE to lock
up completely.

Other notes:
------------

a) These symptoms don't occur if the frame is dropped while empty, and
the TTables are added later.

b) The symptoms can be "fixed" by converting the misbehaving Form1 to
text, then back to form -- but is this really fixing anything?

Versions:

NT4 SP6a, D5.01

Any clues?

TIA,

Graham

--------------------------------------------
Graham Wideman
MS MVP for Visio
Book: Visio 2000 Developer's Survival Guide
... and resources for programmable diagramming at:
http://www.diagramantics.com
--------------------------------------------
Unoffical Visio FAQ:
http://www.diagramantics.com/diagenvs/visio/faq/index.htm
gra...@wideman-one.com.nospam
(Remove the obvious to email me)
---------------------------------------------

In article <39EC2120.15AD2...@wideman-one.com.nospam>, MVP Graham Wideman
wrote:

Well, to start with i cannot reproduce it in D 5.01, Win95B...

Peter Below (TeamB)  100113.1...@compuserve.com)
No e-mail responses, please, unless explicitly requested!

Peter:

Thanks for giving it a try... I've temporarily just decided to
workaround this problem by rearranging my forms so that the inserted
frame sits on the form directly, not in a Panel.

However, since that time I've noticed a few other oddities:
1. Some left/right-anchored controls (labels) in the frame wind up with
the wrong width. Indeed, when the parent frame is resized, the
corresponding left/right anchored controls on the form inherit changes
from the frame (which of course is incorrect)... and the control.width
appears to measure as though the right edge of the control in question
is relative to the form, not the frame.

2. I've noted that a locally-set property of a frame-hosted component
(someframe.TabSheet1.Visible FWIW) will not persist. I set it on the
form, but after save it reverts to inherited.

Bottom line... this has me wondering what other properties are not
properly either inheriting or persisting local values... properties that
are not visible and so don't jump out as a problem.

I'm so used to Delphi being reassuringly solid and predictable that this
is a bit worrisome!

I'd appreciate if anyone with more extensive experience with Frames
could comment as to how extensive this kind of problem is, or specific
known problems to watch for.

TIA!

Graham

--------------------------------------------
Graham Wideman
MS MVP for Visio
Book: Visio 2000 Developer's Survival Guide
... and resources for programmable diagramming at:
http://www.diagramantics.com
--------------------------------------------
Unoffical Visio FAQ:
http://www.diagramantics.com/diagenvs/visio/faq/index.htm
gra...@wideman-one.com.nospam
(Remove the obvious to email me)
---------------------------------------------