Adding Images to forms (advanced) - Mad Cow

Adding colour and images (Advanced)
By: Mad Cow

This course will teach you about forms. The difficulty varies from beginner to intermediate to advanced.


Requirements
Pretty good knowlage of SCAR Forms

Overview
In Chapter 3, I will show you how to add images and change the background colour of your forms.

Setting up
First we need to open the form editor and either continue a project or start a new one



Adding a background colour
First of all, open the SCAR Form Editor(You should know how to by now )

Now click on the blank form and in object inspector Go to "Border Icons -> Color".

Eg.


It's that simple!!!

Now save the form and exit the form editor.

Implementing the Form into the script

Go to "Tools -> Load DFM Form"

Declare the variables and place the code in a new procedure called "InitForm"(I know you've been through this a million times, just incase someone forgets).

Now add your SafeCall procedures:

Code (Text):

1. procedure SafeInitForm;
2. var
3.   v: TVariantArray;
4. begin
5.   setarraylength(V, 0);
6.   ThreadSafeCall('InitForm', v);
7. end;
8.  
9. procedure ShowFormModal;
10. begin
11.   frmDesign.ShowModal;
12. end;
13.  
14. procedure SafeShowFormModal;
15. var
16.   v: TVariantArray;
17. begin
18.   setarraylength(V, 0);
19.   ThreadSafeCall('ShowFormModal', v);
20. end;

And also set

Code (Text):

1.   frmDesign.Visible := True;

to

Code (Text):

1.   frmDesign.Visible := False;

Finally add

Code (Text):

1.   SafeInitForm;
2.   SafeShowFormModal;

to your main begin

Your script should look something like this:

Code (Text):

1. program FormTutorialAddingBackGroundColours;
2. var
3.   frmDesign : TForm;
4.  
5. procedure ShowFormModal;
6. begin
7.   frmDesign.ShowModal;
8. end;
9.  
10. procedure SafeShowFormModal;
11. var
12.   v: TVariantArray;
13. begin
14.   setarraylength(V, 0);
15.   ThreadSafeCall('ShowFormModal', v);
16. end;
17.  
18. procedure SafeInitForm;
19. var
20.   v: TVariantArray;
21. begin
22.   setarraylength(V, 0);
23.   ThreadSafeCall('InitForm', v);
24. end;
25.  
26. procedure InitForm;
27. begin
28.   frmDesign := CreateForm;
29.   frmDesign.Left := 256;
30.   frmDesign.Top := 84;
31.   frmDesign.Width := 419;
32.   frmDesign.Height := 310;
33.   frmDesign.Caption := 'frmDesign';
34.   frmDesign.Color := clBlack;
35.   frmDesign.Font.Color := clWindowText;
36.   frmDesign.Font.Height := -11;
37.   frmDesign.Font.Name := 'MS Sans Serif';
38.   frmDesign.Font.Style := [];
39.   frmDesign.Visible := False;
40.   frmDesign.PixelsPerInch := 96;
41. end;
42.  
43. begin
44.   SafeInitForm;
45.   SafeShowFormModal;
46. end.

Now your done! Moving on to the hard part - Images.

Adding images to Forms
So you want to add images huh? Well let me go through a few procedure's that I will be using.

Code (Text):

1. GetBitmapCanvas(ImageNameHere);

This basically gets the bitmap canvas so we can use it for our next procedure

Code (Text):

1. procedure SafeCopyCanvas(Source, Dest: TCanvas; sx1, sy1, sx2, sy2, dx1, dy1, dx2, dy2: Integer);

Alright.
Source = The canvas
Destination = frmDesign.Canvas (Copies the bitmap canvas to the form)
sx1, sy1, sx2, sy2 = Basically the size of the Bitmap(Or change if you on;y want to use part of the bitmap)
dx1, dy1, dx2, dy2 = Where to copy the image to(Usually the same as sx1, sy1, sx2, sy2)

Now we got the procedures worked out, you will need to find a bitmap to use. Depending on how big the bitmap is, either use “Script -> Picture to Stringâ€

 

Nice tutorial!