How to Modify Controls at Runtime

You can modify UI components and controls (especially their properties) at runtime with ExeOutput’s HEScript engine.

Setting and Getting Property Values #

HEScript provides two functions for this purpose:

• SetUIProp: Sets the value of a specified property for a control identified by its ID.
• GetUIProp: Gets the value of a specified property for a control identified by its ID.

procedure SetUIProp(const id, propname, propval: String);

• id: The name of the component followed by the name of the control.
• propname: The name of the property.
• propval: The new value to assign (always a string).

function GetUIProp(const id, propname: String): String;

• id: The name of the component followed by the name of the control.
• propname: The name of the property.
• result: The value of the property (as a string). An error may occur if the control is not found.

Determining a Control’s ID #

In ExeOutput, a control’s ID is formed by concatenating the parent component’s name and the control’s name (with no space in between).

For example, for a Timer1 control that belongs to the timer1 component, its ID would be timer1Timer1.

Changing a Control’s Caption #

The following HEScript code changes the Home button’s caption:

procedure Procedure1;
begin
  SetUIProp("ribbon1BHome", "Caption", "TEST!!");
  ShowMessage("This is Procedure 1 from the UserMain script. I changed the Home button caption!");
end;

In the code above, ribbon1BHome specifies that we are modifying a property of the BHome UI control, which belongs to the ribbon1 UI component. Caption is the name of the property, and the last parameter is the new value.

Showing or Hiding a Control #

The following HEScript code hides the control named UserLabel:

procedure Procedure2;
begin
  SetUIProp("ribbon1UserLabel", "Visible", "False");
end;

To make it visible again:

procedure Procedure2;
begin
  SetUIProp("ribbon1UserLabel", "Visible", "True");
end;

To execute these HEScript procedures, please refer to the topic on how to call HEScript functions from PHP, HTML (links), and JavaScript.