While editing (designing) a form, you can adjust properties of a form’s horizontal and vertical scrollbars (HorzScrollBar, VertScrollBar) in the Object Inspector. By default, form scrollbars will appear automatically, ie. whenever a control on the form is positioned outside (or overlapping) any edge of the form. Example controls are Label, EditBox and Button.
However, I would suggest that you avoid designing a form which relies on scrollbars to provide access to ‘out of bounds’ controls. This honours the user interface design guideline of minimizing the number of steps a user must take to achieve something. A useful rule of thumb is to optimize the design for an ‘average’ screen resolution of 1024 x 768, but also to support lower (800 x 600) and higher (1280 x 1024). The form should be tested with each screen resolution.
One possibility is to allow the user to resize or maximize the form:
Form1.BorderStyle = bsSizeable
unless the form is really a (fixed size) dialog box:
Form1.BorderStyle = bsDialog
This option can be used effectively in combination with the Align property of each control on the form. If, for example, a form has a number of Label and EditBox controls, all of them could have Align = alTop; then regardless of the form size, all controls align automatically, from top to bottom, to occupy the available horizontal space. Consider using Panel or Bevel controls to provide spacing between other controls.
Note that you may need to take into account the variation when the Windows display is set to use large (or small) fonts.
You may find it necessary to separate a user interface into two (or more) forms in order to honour these guidelines.
More information on the design of forms is available in the help file which documents the Standard and Additional tabs of the Component palette. Search the index for “user interface” then navigate to “Managing layout”.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Advansys Support
