How to hide/show forms without cross-referencing?

[C0m3b4ck]

Hello, I recently came over from Visual Basic 6 to Free Pascal. In Visual Basic 6, you have an option to hide forms like this: FormName.Hide. I attempted to replicate that in FP, but needed to include a form's unit in order to hide it. Since my program only has 4 forms, I quickly encountered the problem of cross-referencing and that did not allow me to compile.

My question is: how to call a function that hides a form without cross-referencing? Do I need to do this in main unit? Please preferably give a simple solution but any solution is welcome!

Thank you in advance! 

[cdbc]

Hi
Well, an example says more than words...
Read the comments in the source...
Regards Benny

[creaothceann]

I attempted to replicate that in FP, but needed to include a form's unit in order to hide it. Since my program only has 4 forms, I quickly encountered the problem of cross-referencing and that did not allow me to compile

You can include the other unit in the implementation's uses list.

Code: Pascal  [Select][+][-]

1. unit Unit1;
2.  
3.  
4. interface
5. uses
6.         // ...
7.  
8.  
9. implementation
10. uses
11.         Unit2, // ...
12.  
13.  
14. procedure Test;
15. begin
16.         Form2.Hide;  // Form2 is in Unit2
17. end;
18.  
19.  
20. end.

[C0m3b4ck]

Thank you cdbc and creaothceann, I will check it out and if it works and I have no more questions, the form can be closed.

[C0m3b4ck]

I decided to use my initial idea with a module called FormManager that stores all of the required functions. Then I added initialization of each form right before "application.run" in my .lfm file. For each form, the initialization would look like this:

Code: Pascal  [Select][+][-]

1. RegisterForm('formnametobeused', Tform_name)

Each of these forms then use FormManager. Note that the hide function does not work when called from a form to hide itself, so I used Self.Hide in such cases. Files below - check out bookworm.lfm, FormManager.pas for the functions and usage. Feel free to use!