group-box

Class

The class of a group-box control.

Control

Draws a black titled box of specified size. Used to group items. Note that though this widget appears as a simple line around other widgets, it is actually an opaque area. Therefore, you need to insure that any widgets appearing inside the group-box are displayed after the group-box is (since otherwise they will be buried behind the opaque group-box). The buried widgets will be invisible.

The order in which you need to list the widgets depends on when you create them. If you are passing in a list of widgets to make-window, the group-box should come after the items inside it. If, on the other hand, you are calling add-component to add individual widgets to a parent window that already exists, then you should either add the group-box before adding the widgets that are inside it, or else pass the optional behind argument to add-component when adding the group-box, so that it will be placed behind existing widgets rather than possibly burying them. When interactively placing widgets onto form windows in the IDE, the form window knows how to keep group-boxes behind any widgets that they encompass, and so you don't need to handle that yourself.

If the title property of a group-box is either nil or the null string, then no title is drawn and the border forms a complete rectangle. Also, the top edge of the group box will move up to the top edge of the group box's region (rather than being a bit lower as usual to align with the vertical center of the title text).

If either the width or the height of a group-box is less than 20, then the group box will be drawn as a single vertical or horizontal line (respectively) instead of as a narrow box, and the title will not be drawn. The single line will still have a 3D look as long as the border is :raised-edge or :sunken-edge.

See About how to get sample code for creating controls in cgide.htm, which explains how to use the IDE to create such code.

Note about releases prior to 6.1: this class was named lisp-group-box. The symbol lisp-group-box still names a class which is a subclass of group-box with nothing added.

A diagram of window and widget classes is shown in Widget and window classes in cgide.htm.

Copyright (c) 1998-2016, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
This page was not revised from the 8.1 page.
Created 2010.1.21.