containercontrol inheritance

Hello Xojo Developers,

this is my first post here.
I found out an interesting behavior of the Container Control that I would like to share with you.

As you all probably know it is not possible to inherit from a Container Control once you’ve put controls to it in the design editor.
I always found this annoying when you want to reuse the container control and only rearrange the controls you have added to it.

Now I have found a nice workaround:

Define the container control as a class and add the controls as properties.
You can code all the logic in this class. Event handling is a bit tedious though, as you have to use addHandler.

Now you can add a container control to the project which inherits from your class and and place a control for every control property.

In the constructor of the new container you assign the controls from the layout to the control properties:

parentTextfield = layoutTextfield
parentButton = layoutButton

Now you can reuse the container with different layouts or add additional controls and functionality.

Greetings from Germany
Martin

You can inherit from a container control, but you can only subclass and add code, you cannot subclass and add controls.

Dear Eli Ott,

thank you for your answer but you missed the point.
I mean something like this:

Protected Class CCParent Inherits Containercontrol
Sub doSomething()
  MsgBox txtParent.Text
End Sub

Protected txtParent As TextField
End Class

Sub doSomething()
  MsgBox txtParent.Text
End Sub
End Class

Now put in a Containercontrol in design mode and inherit from CCParent

Sub constructor()
  txtParent = txtChild //assign reference from actual control to inherited textfield property 
End Sub

Sub Action()  //push button added in design mode
  doSomething
End Sub

No I didn’t. I was only referring to this sentence which is incorrect:

That’s just what I was looking for to ease the pain of accommodating multiple mobile device screen sizes and orientations with a web app. I’d had the same idea but gave up when the IDE did not offer WebContainer as a possible superclass to my logic-performing object, and did not offer my logic-performing object class (subclassed from WebContainer) as a super for the UI WebContainer. Turns out if you just type them in it works, yay!