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Mark L. Tiede · Guest

I have created my own component. It happens to contain other components. I
create these other components on the fly. I would like to name the
components in a unique way, as the IDE does. How do I get a unique name for
my contained components?

I made this component years ago and avoided the issue by just not naming
them. When I did name them, I was getting a name conflict when I put
another instance of my object on the form since the SAME names were being
used for the contained components for each instance. Hope that made sense.

In any event, I have a need for naming them now. And it looked goofy in the
property inspector when there was no name on the objects. It would show the
class of the object when there was no name either.

So anyway, I need to be able to rename my contained objects in a unique
fashion at design time as the IDE does when it places new objects on the
form.

Mark L. Tiede · Guest

Oops. I meant to say

Robert Cerny · Guest

Your best bet is to convert it to Frame.
1. you solve this issue.
2. you create/modify this compound component in designer, instead in code

Otherwise use a name generator function:
procedure AssignComponentName(Item:TComponent);
var A : integer;
C : TComponent;
Default:string
begin
Default := Item.ClassName;
delete(Default,1,1);
for A := 1 to MaxInt do if
Item.Owner.FindComponent(Default+IntToStr(A))=nil then begin
Item.Name := Default+IntToStr(A);
Exit;
end;
end;

--
Robert Cerny
http://codecentral.borland.com/codecentral/ccWeb.exe/author?authorid=18355

"Mark L. Tiede" <mtiede (AT) mjwcorp (DOT) com> wrote

Mark L. Tiede · Guest

Robert,

I don't think I want to make a frame since there may be other consequences
of doing that. I am not aware of any COMPONENTS that are frame descendents,
so I shouldn't have to do that.

As for the second option, the code, this code would only search the OWNER
for similarly named components which would not be guaranteed to work if 2
instances of my object were created with differing owners. Although, maybe
that would be sufficient since for the IDE, the owner is always the form and
when an object is created dynamically at run-time, it doesn't complain about
more than one object with the same name.

I guess I am still searching for an "official" way to go about this. And
since we don't have the IDE source code, we don't know how they determine
unique names when new objects are created.

"Robert Cerny" <robert.qwe.cerny (AT) neosys (DOT) xrs.qwe.si> wrote