Simple Bevel Control

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Introduction

Recently, I ran into the problem of grouping components visually. I wasn't satisfied with panels and groupboxes so I searched for an alternative. After some Googling, I decided to write a simple control by myself.

Background

"Good ol' Delphi" provided a nifty component called TBevel for visually grouping controls. It's not a container and acts only like a "spacer".

Controls like this are often used to divide buttons at the bottom of a form from the others above. Take a look at the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons in the screen shot. They are visually grouped together and divided from the rest.

Using the code

Provided are four additional properties:

public enum BevelStyle
{
  Lowered,
  Raised
}

public enum BevelType 
{
  Box, 
  Frame, 
  TopLine, 
  BottomLine, 
  LeftLine,
  RightLine, 
  Spacer                        
}

Points of Interest

Well, there are none... It's just a simple graphical control. Nothing special - but definitely a "nice to have".

There is only one thing I could mention here: The value BevelType.Spacer displays a dotted rect around the control only at designtime.

History

• 26^th January, 2007: Initial release