Adding Custom control to another custom control

What i am trying to accomplish is to create new touchkeyboard.

First i created buttons which i derive from speed buttons. That done, now i need to create multiple buttons and layout them somewhere. This is were i get stuck.

I created a new component which i derive from开发者_JAVA百科 TGraphicControl (this should be my new touchkeyboard), but i don't know how to add components to canvas. I actually don't know whether i'm supposed to add them to canvas or to some other component (eg. panel)!?!

Is my approach OK?

Thanks in advance.

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If you're creating a custom visual control, you need to create the buttons and position them manually. For example:

TOnScreenKeyboard = class(TWinControl)
public
  constructor Create(AOwner: TComponent);
end;

[...]

constructor TOnScreenKeyboard.Create(AOwner : TComponent)
var
  TempButton : TSpeedButton;
begin
  inherited;
  TempButton := TSpeedButton.Create(self);
  TempButton.Parent := self;
  TempButton.Top := 10;
  TempButton.Left := 15;
  TempButton.Caption := 'A';
end;

You can put the button creation into a loop and position each one according to where it should be.

(I wrote this off the top of my head, and I don't write a lot of Pascal anymore, so there may be some minor mistakes! But it should get you started.)

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Because of your wording and confusion between Panel, Canvas and custom controls in general, I assume you're a Delphi beginner. You need to learn about frames: embarcadero docwiki link on frames

Frames allow you to create re-usable portions of GUI. You use the IDE to "draw" the frame, you can then place that composite control (the frame) onto forms or other frames. It's a very powerful feature and it's conceptually very close to what other languages call "custom controls" (very close to what asp.net or WPF consider a custom control to be).

In the Delphi world, when you say "custom control", people would normally expect you to want to create an reusable control that's placed in a package and it's installed in the IDE. It's an fairly advanced subject. If that's what you want then I misunderstood the question, sorry.