No, formcreate is the correct event to set up new components. OnShow may be called multiple times in the lifetime of a form. Michael.

In OnShow I use a counter to only do the change on the first show. I've even made a FirstShow event years ago.

I trust what you say since you are very experienced in Delphi and Lazarus, however I could swear that I have been bitten by a bug before where not all the components on the form are necessarily initialized in FormCreate. i.e. I could swear that some components, aren't guaranteed to be fully ready, just because a form is created.... Does the form create guarantee the componenents are all ready for modification and initialized, because I could absolutely swear that this has haunted me before where the form itself is ready and created, but that didn't guarantee the children of the form were all ready...

So a solution, was to put a counter in FormShow (local const var or whatever you call those strange things that persist like a global, but are still local) and access the components on the first show only.

If I could just find one other person that has been haunted by accessing components in formcreate, then I'd confirm I am not imagining things and my memory is solid. However, you've been programming far longer so... I am wanting to trust what you say!

I previously wrote

If I could just find one other person that has been haunted by accessing components in formcreate, then I'd confirm I am not imagining things

i.e. here are some issues others have come across which may be semi related to problems I have experienced, or not:

Quote "However sometimes a few special things can cause problems in FormCreate, usually related to the order window handles are created, and for such special cases FormShow can also be abused for initialization. " -- Jens Grusche, (posted on another delphi list)

And this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3261653/why-would-something-fail-in-formcreate-but-work-fine-in-formshow

However these may be issues with formcreate that are not related to the bugs I have come across. I'm trying to remember what exactly was the problem that I had in FormCreate, but can't remember. I do recall having to create a FirstShow hack to do what I needed to do... I don't like using the FormShow event, even with a counter, since it is called multiple times and FormCreate is only called once.

El 22/09/16 a les 08:47, Lars ha escrit:

However these may be issues with formcreate that are not related to the bugs I have come across. I'm trying to remember what exactly was the problem that I had in FormCreate, but can't remember

I don't remember exactly, but the size of the component isn't the final one (depending on align, anchors or autosize, as I said I don't remeber the details) until the FormShow, so if you need them to initialize other components you have to wait.

Bye

anything that causes the form to redraw,
(as it's been indicated in responses here too - resizing, aligning, changing colours etc) is a really bad idea, because there may not be anything to answer the OnPaint events yet while FormCreate is being serviced.

(Speculation because I haven't dived that deep: the visual component hierarchy on the form is kept in a tree-like structure, that is being walked top-down by a single thread, and so other components' OnCreate is called AFTER their parent is created, and not necessarily in order of appearance (in order of being placed on form, presumably?) Whereas in On(First)Show of the main form you can assume the entire tree exists and has sizes and positions calculated at least once)

Hope it's not overly far from truth ;)

-L.

There is no OnPaint during OnCreate.

(Speculation because I haven't dived that deep: the visual component hierarchy on the form is kept in a tree-like structure, that is being walked top-down by a single thread, and so other components' OnCreate is called AFTER their parent is created, and not necessarily in order of appearance (in order of being placed on form, presumably?)

The order of dropping the components on the form defines the creation order.

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Mattias