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### 10.11 Groups

As described in the tutorial about the Forms Library, sets of radio buttons must be placed inside groups. Groups are also useful for other purposes. E.g., you can hide a group inside an application program with one command. Hence, the Form Designer has some mechanism to deal with groups.

In the control panel there is a list of groups in the current form. As long as you don’t have groups, this list will be empty. To create a group, select the objects that should become members of the group and press the function key `<F7>`. You will be prompted for the name of the group. This should be a legal C variable name (under which the group will be known to the application program) or should be left empty. This name will be added to the list. In this way you can create many groups. Note that each object can be member of only one group. So if you select it again and put it in a new group, it will be removed from its old group. Groups that become empty this way automatically disappear from the list. (When putting objects in a group they will be raised. This is unavoidable due to the structure of groups.)

In the list of groups it is always indicated which groups are part of the current selection. (Only the groups that are fully contained in the selection are indicated, not those that are only partially contained in it.) It is also possible to add or delete groups in the current selection by pushing the mouse on their name in the list. A simple click on a groups name will select this group and deselect all objects not belonging to it. Clicking on a groups name while the `<Shift>` key is pressed down adds the group to the cuurent selection.

Note that there is no mechanism to add an object to a group directly. This can, however, be achieved using the following procedure: select the group and the new object and press `<F7>` to group them. The old group will be discarded and a new group will be created. You only have to type in the group name again.

You can use the menu "Rename group" from the "Group" menu to change the name of a selected group. Only a single group may be selected when changing the name.

Next: Hiding and Showing Objects, Previous: Copy and Paste, Up: Part II Creating Forms [Contents][Index]