Dear Xailer users,

One of the most important features included on Xailer 3.1 is the complete support of Form visual inheritance. Until now Xailer included a limited inheritance visual support, where only the ancestor form could be given on its creation.

The inherited form incorporated all the controls from its ancestor form, but none of its properties or inherited parent controls properties could be modified. However the new controls included on the inherited form could. In order to modify any inherited control it should be performed on run-time or in its ancestor form.

We have always thought that it was an error to modify any inherited properties of the parent form. On those cases we believe is better to us the parent as a template, which is something Xailer already supports. But in fact, the functionality offered by our visual inheritance was indeed limited, because the strength of the our IDE visual design was useless on this cases.

On Xailer 3.1, we still lock parent form properties and controls, but we have open the design to all inherited controls of type container. This way we achieve that Xailer IDE is completely functional on those controls and we do not compromise the stability our actual inheritance system.

For example, all this operations can be done on inherited controls:

• Add a TFolderPage to an inherited TFolder control and completely design it adding all the controls you need.
• Add a button to an inherited TToolBar.
• Add new elements to an inherited TExplorerBar.

We highly recommend to have a look a the sample SamplesVisualInheritancehervis.xpj.

Xailer 3.1 show in gray color all the inherited controls on the object inspector.

We hope you like the approach done to visual inheritance in Xailer 3.1. We are really excited with the result and we will like to encourage all of you to use it on your next projects.

Best regards,
[Xailer team]