Back in the XE2 timeframe, I published a short post about giving a TPanel a custom colour. While the solution still works in XE4, give or take an extra unit in the uses clause or use of the TAlphaColors.ColorName syntax rather than claColorName, nowadays I’d emphasise the first part of my original advice. This was quite simple – don’t try and give a TPanel a custom colour in the first place! If you want an irregularly styled TPanel, use a TRectangle instead, whose colours you can customise to your heart’s content:
- Add a TRectangle to the form.
- Change Stroke.Color to Gray.
- Change Fill.Color to whatever you want.
- At runtime, change the colour with code like this:
MyRectangle.Fill.Color := TAlphaColors.Blue;
Annoyingly, and dating from the infamous XE2 update 4, TRectangle is made to pretend it can’t parent other controls at designtime. As such, when a TRectangle is selected and you double click on a control type in the Tool Palette, the new control is added parented to the rectangle’s parent, not the rectangle itself. However, you can use the Structure pane top left to reparent controls as you wish.
As an aside, this highlights a key difference between FMX and the VCL: in FMX, all controls can potentially be parents to any other. Once you grasp this point, obsessing over wanting to use a TPanel specifically, even though you don’t want the normal TPanel ‘look’, is completely illogical.
