dynamic buttons on the form

Hi,
I have a main form and 3 MDI child form. I have 6 different buttons altogether for the application. I need somhow to able to view 2 buttons at a time depending upon the child form opened. I can hide the buttons but I cannot display different button at the same location.
Can anyone help me out with this..

Thanks in advance
Mahendra Ghuge

Where are the buttons you are trying to hide and display? Are they on the main form or are they on different child forms?

If they are on the child forms, you should be able to use the onshow and onclose events of the child forms themselves to display and hide the relevant buttons. To hide and display the buttons, just set the visible property of each individual button to either true or false depending on whether you want the button to be seen or hidden.

There are two ways of doing this.

1). Have six buttons on your main form and depending on which child form you display using your main menu options, display the two buttons you need and hide the other four using the visible property of the buttons (True/False).

2). Have just two buttons and declare a variable in your main forms public section.

  public
    WhichForm : String;
    { Public declarations }
  end;

Whenever you call one of your child forms, set the variable.

WhichForm := 'ChildForm1';

Then, in your two buttons, check your variable before cediding which procedure to run.

i.e.

if WhichForm = 'ChildForm1' then
begin
  Do your procedure for child form1
end;
if WhichForm = 'ChildForm2' then
begin
  Do your procedure for child form2
end;
if WhichForm = 'ChildForm3' then
begin
  Do your procedure for child form3
end;

I assume you mean that you are trying to place a second button on the same form, i.e. over the top of the first button.

If this is the case, there is a BringToFront function for visual components, but I would be tempted to just change the caption of the button depending on what the user has selected. You could then use the buttons caption in the same way as a variable. So, in the buttons OnClick event you could have something like

if Button1.Caption = 'Button1' then
begin
  Do the button1 procedure
end;
if Button1.Caption = 'Button2' then
begin
  Do whatever the button2 procedure was meant to do
end;

Hi,
Let me explain you in more detail. I have 3 MDI child forms which are displayed depending upon the drop-down menu option on the Main form. For each MDI child form I have 2 buttons on the main form performing some operations. These operations are different for all 3MDI froms. So for each MDI form displayed there are 2 different buttons on the main form. any suggestion how to encounter this issue??

Hello,
I had tried this before but there is a issue here.
The location (X,Y) of a button. Suppose Button1 is on location (X,Y) for the child window 1. Now I need to hide this button1 for child window 2 and place a new button Button2 on the same location (X,Y). This doesnot seem to work. I can have the button on the different location coordinate but I am not able to place 2 buttons at the same location coordinate (X,Y).

Hi angel,
That works fine .. thanks for your help