Introduction to PowerBuilder

Listing Controls

As we have just seen, when you copy and paste a control, it appears directly on top of the original. Back in the section on CommandButton, we saw that when you deselected the visible property, the control disappeared from both the run-time and the design view.

Both of these situations can cause you to 'lose' some controls visually to get around this problem PowerBuilder allows you to see a list of all the controls that you have placed on a window. This catalog of controls is called the Control List and you can call it up by selecting "Edit/Control List..."

You can select all of the controls on your window from here, and  affect changes against any of the properties of it by selecting the Properties button to take you to the relevant properties dialog.

Sometimes, you may place a control on the window, but don't want to display it to the user. So set "Visible" property to false. When you do this, you can't see the control at painting time as well as at run-time. If you want to see all the controls including hidden controls at painting time, select "Design/Options" and select "Show Invisibles" option in the "General" tab. This displays the hidden controls at painting time only.

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