Backdrop

When do you expect backdrop to work, or is there a workaround!?
I mean, why include the feature if it’s not working…
Or, is it working in the compiled versions of Mac OS and Linux, but not in Windows!?

Backdrop? Of what? Window? Canvas? And what isn’t working?

Excuse me. I thought it was a reserved word or expression!

I mean, the image in the background of a project. On the “window”…

[quote=200970:@Jakob Krabbe]Excuse me. I thought it was a reserved word or expression!

I mean, the image in the background of a project. On the “window”…[/quote]

Jakob, sorry, I do not understand what you are talking about.

Are you setting a window.backdrop to an image?
Is the window type set to be an MDI parent window?

http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/Canvas.Backdrop
http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/Window.Backdrop

[quote=200698:@Jakob Krabbe]When do you expect backdrop to work, or is there a workaround!?
I mean, why include the feature if it’s not working…
Or, is it working in the compiled versions of Mac OS and Linux, but not in Windows!?[/quote]
What are you trying to accomplish exactly?

And both of shao sean’s links work very well on my Windows 7x64 machine that I am typing this post from using 2015r2.

Here is the backdrop in the IDE. Maybe I’m missing something…
I thought we discussed these things earlier. I shall look on the links, thank you!

When compiling, there is no image.
The format is correct and also, now I tried open event:

’ ## BACKDROP
main.Backdrop = backdrop


The red and green images, the true and false images, are working, in other parts of the project.

[quote=200992:@Jakob Krabbe]http://syscare.se/files/backdrop.jpg

Here is the backdrop in the IDE. Maybe I’m missing something…
I thought we discussed these things earlier. I shall look on the links, thank you![/quote]
Without knowing your application it looks about right. Is the problem only happening at runtime? What is the problem?

Yes. In runtime as well as when compiling.
I have only tried in Windows. I have no Unix and the Mac is not up and go… (The Mac need much love and attention…)

So what is it doing during runtime?

[quote=200992:@Jakob Krabbe]When compiling, there is no image.
The format is correct and also, now I tried open event:

’ ## BACKDROP
main.Backdrop = backdrop


The red and green images, the true and false images, are working, in other parts of the project.[/quote]

Something may be wrong with the picture itself. I never encountered any trouble setting a backdrop to a window, in any version of Xojo under any version of Windows.

You may want to change the format of the picture and see if the problem persists.

Or just post the picture so we can check what is going on.

Hm… You have never encounter a problem!?
So interesting! For me, backdrop has never been working!

I must try little more, because it was a long time since I was working with these things…
Thank you!

[quote=200992:@Jakob Krabbe]When compiling, there is no image.
The format is correct and also, now I tried open event:

’ ## BACKDROP
main.Backdrop = backdrop


The red and green images, the true and false images, are working, in other parts of the project.[/quote]
I missed that edit. I agree with Michel, looks like something in the image is borderline. I would open it up in your image editing software and re-save it out. Then re-import the image to the project just in case.

edit: Here is a program using Window.Backdrop:

I didn’t do so well with the labels over the backdrop in this particular program but it has worked well enough.

One thing I found when developing Check Writer for Windows is that using Paint creates more flicker with controls than using a backdrop picture.

I was actually referring to the contrast. It always bothered me that “Description” is unreadable. Never had an issue with flicker on this program.

I only had an hour to produce this particular program for production. They had30 hours worth of postal forms to get completed in 4 hours. I took one of those hours to produce the program which linked to our backend WMS and filled the forms in about an hour. Leaving the crew time to get other things done. These days the program is no longer used as we use endicia.com’s web services for postage and forms.

Where it is, black does not produce enough contrast. You could probably get a better result making the text color the same as the continents. or simply white.

It is always tricky to have text over windows, though. The issue can often be seen in magazines.

Fantastic!! It is working!!
But not as a BMP or as a PNG (??) as written in the docs, instead gif made it!
The true and false images are gifs… so… I tried and main.backdrop = backdropgif was the answer!

How strange…!
Well. Many things in life is strange, so… it is fine.
I don’t know if it works on Linux and Mac, but at the moment, it’s not that important. After all, some of you fellas at the list may help me to check that later!

Glad you got it figured out.

FWIW- the example above was a JPG.

It may have just been due to the imported name of the image… You will notice after you changed to a GIF that the imported name of the image became ‘backdropgif’… From what I remember, the framework uses PNG internally for all images now…