Delphi Cookbook - Second Edition

Using owner draw combos and listboxes

Many things are organized in a list. Lists are useful when you have to show items or when your user has to choose from a set of possible options. Usually, standard lists are flat, but sometimes, you need to transmit more information in addition to a list of items. Let's think about when you go to choose a font in an advanced text editor such as Microsoft Word or Apache OpenOffice. Having the name of the font drawn in the font style itself helps users make a faster and more reasoned choice. In this recipe, we'll see how to make listboxes more useful. The code is perfectly valid for TComboBox as well.

Getting ready

As we saw in the recipe, Customizing TDBGrid, many VCL controls are able to delegate their drawing, ...