Dear all,

I didn't find a way to change the grey text "(filter)" that appears in TListFilterEdit controls and similar.

I think it could be useful to have a property storing that text in order to be able to personalize it. It's quite common to put a tip to what can be written in that box, something like "Find something..."

I missed it?

Regards,
Andrea Mauri

Hi!

Use can use TListFilterEdit.TextHint if you uye the developer version. Unfortunately .TextHint does not appear in the Object Inspector yet.

2015-10-05 14:06 keltez?ssel, Andrea Mauri ?rta:

I am using lazarus svn fixes_1_4, no texthint here. Is TextHint in trunk?

Andrea

Il 05/10/2015 16:18, P?ter G?bor ha scritto:

I'm using Lazarus 1.5 from trunk (r49937).
Trunk has TextHint since a while...
I hope that the developers will change the classes to allow access of .TextHint in the Object Inspector.

2015-10-05 18:09 keltez?ssel, Andrea Mauri ?rta:

P?ter G?bor wrote

Trunk has TextHint since a while... I hope that the developers will change the classes to allow access of .TextHint in the Object Inspector.

Please post patches (in bugtracker) for controls (TCustomEdit descendants or compound controls that have a TCustomEdit in it) that do not pubish these properties.
They can be assigned to me.

Bart

Patch is posted: http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=28781 I hope I did not miss something...

2015-10-05 18:40 keltez?ssel, Bart ?rta:

Please post patches (in bugtracker) for controls (TCustomEdit descendants or compound controls that have a TCustomEdit in it) that do not pubish these properties.

What do you think about moving TextHint related things from TCustomEdit to TWinControl to make TextHint available for all TWinControl descendants, for example TComboBox.
In this case developers may have unified look of controls on a single form. Anyway TextHint for ComboBoxes would be welcome.

2015-10-05 18:40 keltez?ssel, Bart ?rta:

Please post patches (in bugtracker) for controls (TCustomEdit descendants or compound controls that have a TCustomEdit in it) that do not pubish these properties.

P?ter G?bor wrote

What do you think about moving TextHint related things from TCustomEdit to TWinControl to make TextHint available for all TWinControl descendants, for example TComboBox.

It would be Delphi incompatible.
AFAIK TextHint is introduced in TCustomEdit there.

Bart

Would it be a serious incompatibility that can break compilation of project sources? (I never used delphi)

Do you think that a new ComboBox implementation (based on TComboBox) with copy-pasted TextHint support can be a good solution? ...or it would be better to forget this.

2015-10-07 20:30 keltez?ssel, Bart ?rta:

It would be Delphi incompatible. AFAIK TextHint is introduced in TCustomEdit there.

P?ter G?bor wrote

What do you think about moving TextHint related things from TCustomEdit to TWinControl to make TextHint available for all TWinControl descendants, for example TComboBox.

I don't think it makes sense for all TWinControl derivatives.

In this case developers may have unified look of controls on a single form. Anyway TextHint for ComboBoxes would be welcome.

For TComboBox it would make sense.
It would be an extension and thus not break Delphi compatibility either. I think it is a good idea.

Juha

This is rather more tricky than what we did for TCustomEdit. Mind you that Delphi has it easy,it simply calls some Windows API to get this done, but we need to implement this cross-platform (hence we override RealSetText and RealGetText).
Setting Text in a ComboBox may have other side effects then in a TCustomEdit.

Bart

Ok, I don't know the details well.

Juha

Isn't is possible to paint the TextHint text manually into the combobox / edit?

Ondrej

Ondrej Pokorny wrote

Isn't is possible to paint the TextHint text manually into the combobox / edit?

At least TCustomEdit does not have a canvas, so that won't work (would have been so much easier than the current implementation). Does TComboBox have a canvas?

Bart

TComboBox must have a canvas because it supports OwnerDrawing.

Ondrej

Ondrej Pokorny wrote

TComboBox must have a canvas because it supports OwnerDrawing.

You're right.
And if OwnerDrawing is False then everything you write tothe cnavs gets erased whenever the control paints itself.
So, maybe not the way to go.

Bart

Bart wrote

You're right. And if OwnerDrawing is False then everything you write tothe cnavs gets erased whenever the control paints itself. So, maybe not the way to go.

True.

I was able to paint custom shapes on TEdit on Windows with this approach:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9758016/how-do-i-custom-draw-of-tedit-control-text . It works well.

But it fails on Linux/Gtk2. The edit control is always painted after my paint procedure, overpainting everything except a tiny space between bounds and the edit.

But if we assume that it is possible in TComboBox with OwnerDraw, there must be a way how to do it even on Gtk2. Or is OwnerDraw linked with some Gtk2-ComboBox property?

Ondrej

Ondrej Pokorny wrote

But if we assume that it is possible in TComboBox with OwnerDraw, there must be a way how to do it even on Gtk2. Or is OwnerDraw linked with some Gtk2-ComboBox property?

It may be possible, but TextHint vailability cannot depend on OwnerDraw.

Bart

TextHint could be visibile even when edit is focused (but still empty of course). This is how many edit controls work nowadays, e.g address edit in FireFox
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Krzysztof wrote

TextHint could be visibile even when edit is focused (but still empty of course). This is how many edit controls work nowadays, e.g address edit in FireFox

This is exactly what I was thinking. The rekonq browser has the same. It is even able to put a button in front of the text in the edit and start the text after the edit + the hint text is centered. I admit that I don't know if rekonq uses Qt or Gtk2.

Whereas I know how to achieve it on Windows (one can find a lot of sources for it in the internet), on other widgetsets it could be tricky as Bart already stated. Unfortunately I don't have the knowledge to do it in all widgetsets :(

Ondrej
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Ondrej Pokorny wrote

This is exactly what I was thinking. The rekonq browser has the same. It is even able to put a button in front of the text in the edit and start the text after the edit + the hint text is centered. I admit that I don't know if rekonq uses Qt or Gtk2.

Rekonq uses both QT and KDE libs. Not directly usable for LCL implementation but a nice idea anyway.

Juha

Juha Manninen wrote

Rekonq uses both QT and KDE libs. Not directly usable for LCL implementation but a nice idea anyway.

It was not exactly an idea to implement it in the LCL but more an argument that it is possible to do advanced stuff (custom painting, text area moving etc.) even on Linux and not only on Windows.

So that means that it is possible to custom paint an edit at least on Qt. It is another problem that we (me definitely) don't know how to do it.

Rekonq source is available on the internet
https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/network/rekonq/repository so somebody with Qt knowledge could check how they do it and if it is possible to use a similar approach in the LCL.

The fact that TextHint uses the "normal" Text property in TEdit sounds more a hack to me. Such custom painting could be safely used for TComboBox as well.

Safari is able to do the same on OSX, so I assume that custom painting is available on every widgetset.

Ondrej

Ondrej Pokorny wrote

This is exactly what I was thinking. The rekonq browser has the same. It is even able to put a button in front of the text in the edit and start the text after the edit + the hint text is centered. I admit that I don't know if rekonq uses Qt or Gtk2.

That's because rekonq uses kdelibs which have their own implementation of QLineEdit.

zeljko

Yes, it's possible to achieve that goal with Qt. In event filter of TQtLineEdit add QPaintEvent, and:
1.Paint QLineEdit by Qt - use QObject_event(Widget, Event); 2.Now call SlotPaint() which creates TQtDeviceContext and passes it to LCL ... if TEdit have Canvas and OnPaint you can do whatever in that case. 3.Now set Result := True in QPaintEvent, so Qt won't paint it again.

zeljko

Ondrej Pokorny wrote

The fact that TextHint uses the "normal" Text property in TEdit sounds more a hack to me. Such custom painting could be safely used for TComboBox as well.

Yes it is.
We did it that way because not all widgetsets natively support such a feature (or at least we were not aware of this).
And we were not willing to make TCustomEdit "custom painted".

TextHint is natively supported on Windows (and most likely on WinCE) via a system API.
If (and only if) this can be achieved via all other widgetsets (QT, GTK2, Carbon, Cocoa) the hack can be removed and the code can be moved to the widgetset implementation.

So, does anybody know wether the other widgetsets offer this functionalitly natively?

Bart