{"id":750,"date":"2011-09-06T09:51:53","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T21:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/?p=750"},"modified":"2011-09-06T09:57:02","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T21:57:02","slug":"xe2-firemonkey-designer-clipboard-niggles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/posts\/750\/","title":{"rendered":"XE2 FireMonkey Designer – Clipboard Gotcha"},"content":{"rendered":"[Estimated Reading Time: <\/span> 4<\/span> minutes]<\/span><\/span>

We are still waiting for our XE2 licenses to be organised but in the meantime I have started playing around with the Free Trial Edition<\/a>. I haven’t had much time to form much of an opinion as yet, but have already identified some oddities in the FireMonkey Form Designer, specifically in the area of clipboard support.
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\nAt first I thought the clipboard was completely broken in the FireMonkey designer.<\/p>\n

If I created a new FireMonkey application and dropped a few controls on a form and then tried to copy\/paste those controls I simply couldn’t. The Cut\/Copy options on the Edit menu were disabled and the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work.<\/p>\n

\"Cut\/Copy<\/p>\n

I immediately tried the same thing in the VCL form designer and found that everything was working as expected. What was going on?<\/p>\n

Responses to a Google+ post on the issue varied from those who saw the same thing and those who had no problems, all using the same XE2 build but with a variety of VM solutions. Eventually these responses pointed me in the direction of the Structure View… sure enough, I could Cut\/Copy if I first selected the item I wished to Cut\/Copy in the Structure View directly. Having done that, the Form Designer itself then also became “enabled” for Cut\/Copy operations.<\/p>\n

\"Cut\/Copy<\/p>\n

This then raised a quirk in behaviour in the FireMonkey designer “Paste” operation which probably should be resolved. To understand this quirk though, let us quickly remind ourselves how the VCL designer has always worked:<\/p>\n

In the VCL designer if you copy a control and then paste it back into the form, the new instance becomes selected by default. This is A Good Thing<\/strong> – you almost certainly want to change some properties on the new, pasted instance. If you then paste more instances, the freshly pasted control is the “paste context”. More often than not this isn’t important – most VCL controls cannot act as containers for other controls, so if you paste a TButton<\/strong> and then paste another TButton<\/strong>, the designer cannot paste it into the selected TButton<\/strong> and so the new instance is pasted into the selected button’s container.<\/p>\n

This can be easily seen in action:<\/p>\n