Is there a wiki article or some guide about converting a form into a component?

[MarkMLl]

Have there been changes in Lazarus which expose the properties of objects in frames to the objects since then? By that I mean at runtime.

If it didn't work would I really be telling you that it was the only safe way to do it?

After sleeping on this: there were very early code generation problems relating to frames, but those were fixed in FPC 2.7.1. I was using them heavily- in the context of notebook-style containers- by roughly 2010 according to comments in the project's source, and other than the problems caused by design-time instantiation have had no problems since.

I'd say that the overwhelming cause of "I can't access a frame's properties at runtime" are screwups caused by design-time instantiation.

There /is/, obviously, a possibility that something related to RTTI has (or at least had) problems. The only way to work that out is going to be by writing the mandatory standalone test project, which can be provided in compilable form for others if necessary.

MarkMLl

[vfclists]

I use an Object Inspector based component to set the properties at runtime and back then when I tried to use it to set the properties of objects on the frames it didn't work because they weren't exposed.

I don't know if things have changed since then as I replaced the frames with forms to gain that functionality.

That makes sense that there would be something like an object inspector that can be used at runtime. Can you show how you do it? I’m curious.
Also the properties of controls are usually accessible at runtime however the form is the only controls that is intended to be freestanding so maybe that’s why you can’t use frame for this.

Look at {$LazarusDir}/lazarus/examples/objectinspector/oiexample.lpi

[Joanna from IRC]

Wow thanks, that was fun to play with 
I never knew oi could be used at runtime like this