21.9 Custom Controls and their Benefits
Sep/26/2008
Tradepoint
makes heavy use of inherited controls from the normal DevExpress control suite
to add new functionality and ensure consistency across the application and your
plug-ins. Each control has a sub
calls called "DarwinControl" which has these additional properties:
Caption: This is the caption that will
be displayed (by default to the left) of the control. By setting labels this
way, it makes the forms MUCH lighter in weight. In our testing, this tripled the
speed of loading large windows with a large number of label controls on it.
CaptionAlignment: This allows you to
set where the label will be displayed relative to the control.
CaptionColor: The color that the
caption will be displayed in
CaptionFont: The font that will be used
to display the caption. The case of required fields we suggest that you set the
underlined property to true to ensure consistency with the rest of the
application.
HighlightEntry: This is used to
determine if the control will have its background color highlighted when there
is a value in it. This is especially useful for search fields.
RaiseChange: This is used to determine
if data entry of any type in the control will cause a change event to be fired
on the parent form. This is used for database tracking and persistence. In the
case of non-data-bound fields this should be set to false.