Many components have the capability to show images, either from an imagelist or a GDI+ picturecontainer or sometimes both. The GDIPPictureContainer makes it easy to use and embed PNG, JPEG, ICO, BMP, GIF and TIFF images in your applications. The major advantage of the GDIPPictureContainer is that it allows to store images just once in the DFM file and allow to reuse it in different components. The GDIPPictureContainer could be dropped on a datamodule and can be shared between different forms.

First a GDIPPictureContainer component must be dropped on the form and linked to the component.

Previously, adding images at design time to the GDIPPictureContainer was done via a simple collection editor:

With this collection editor, a picture could be loaded for each item in the collection and a name could be set. The process quickly becomes tedious though as you cannot easily see at design time the picture that is behind each item in the collection:

GDIPPictureContainer Editor

To make the use of the GDIPPictureContainer easier and more straightforward, we have designed a special new design time editor. With this design time editor, you have a visual presentation of the images in the GDIPPictureContainer as well as a quick visual overview of available images in folders on your hard disk. Adding images to the GDIPPictureContainer now becomes as straightforward as drag & drop from the image folder to the GDIPPictureContainer picture list.

The power of TAdvSmoothImageListBox

The components that are used for the picture list overview and the image browser are both a TAdvSmoothImageListBox. Below is a list of the included features:

• Drag and drop one or multiple images from the image browser to the picture list.
• Double click on an item in the picture list to change the name.
• Change the view of the picture list or the image browser with a splitter or change the number of columns.
• Browse easily and fast through different folders on your system.
• Fast overview of all added images to the GDIPPictureContainer
• Fast loading & smooth animated scrolling through thousands of images
• Quickly remove and add pictures with one click
• Keyboard lookup based on image name

This new editor will be available in the next version of the TMS Component Pack, and the TMS Smooth Controls Pack

Pieter Scheldeman

This blog post has received 1 comment.

1. Monday, February 8, 2010 at 4:30:56 PM

Looks cool.

Any chance this container wil be available in one of the TMS Intraweb Packs?

Paul

van de Weem Paul