When laying out large datawindows you quite often need to replicate sizes
and styles across many
objects. Back in the PB4 days you could use the right mouse menu to set attributes on
multiple objects. With PB5 and 6 you have to set the attributes through use of the
property sheets. However there is a faster way.
You can change the default values for most of the common object attributes through the use
of the toolbars; most of the common attributes are available but they may not all be on
your current toolbar especially if you are using PB5. So call up the custom toolbar
dialog. I recommend grouping all the attributes together on the toolbar and placing a
spacer either side of the group. I group, back/fore colour, border, width and height.Then
you can use the toolbars in one of two ways, by selecting the field and then altering the
attributes as required by by first selecting an existing field that already looks like
what you want. Then just control click on the object you want to replicate to and click on
the five layout icons, this will clone all the attributes of the object.
If you want to change the background colour of your items to transparent then you have
to use the properties dialog. However a trick is to manually select transparent for the
first object using the properties dialog. If you look at the toolbar icon for the
background colour you will notice it has changed to N (for none). You can now control
select other objects on the datawindow and click the background colour toolbar to change
all of the objects backgrounds to transparent. |