Is there a quick way to copy the design content from one form to another?

Anvil Q&A
1

I’m a totally new to this and I’m not a developer, so if this very rudimentory, I apologise in advance.
In order to have a persistent sidebar I’ve had to create a new Form (main) that will contain the persistent sidebar and title bar and then call the non persistent content into a container within the main form (seems rather convoluted to me, but as I said I’m new to this). So, I now have my old Form1, with the sidebar content removed, but the sidebar container remains and doesn’t appear to be removable. I would like to keep and call the old form into the main form, but I can’t workout how to remove the sidebar and title bar containers, so I thought I would just create a new blank form and copy the content over. However, there’s quite a lot of content on that form with lables, containers, plots etc and re-adding all these, naming them, making sure they’re in the right place etc is a lot of work. So, is there a quicker way to accomplish this? Or, how do I remove the sidebar and title bar containers from the old Form1, as that would be easiest?

The standard page html and themes css code under assets looks to be universal and not page specific, so I don’t think I can make the changes there.

Thank you in adavnce.

2

Yes, there’s a much quicker way: you can duplicate the entire Form!

  1. In the IDE’s leftmost navigation pane, hover your mouse pointer over the Form you wish to duplicate. A three-dot menu button will appear at the end of the Form’s name.
  2. Click that menu button. “Duplicate” will be one of the pop-up options.
3

Yes, I tried that, but that duplicates it with the Sidebar and the title bar still attached to it.

4

And now you can delete all the unwanted stuff.

It’s still quicker than copying the selected items piecemeal.

5

Well, it’s the content that I want to keep and delete the sidebar and title bar, but those 2 oblects get replicated when you duplicate the form and they’re still not deletable.

6

Ah, I get it. In your form, those are effectively inherited from the form’s base class / template. The derived class can’t omit them.

7

Yes, so I have to create a blank form and then re-apply all the content, name and edit each component the same as on the old form, which is very tedious.

8

Copying a component from one form to another does preserve the name and settings. If it’s a container, it copies all the contained components, too.

It just doesn’t copy over the event-handlers.

9

So, I could copy the parent container that holds the child containers within it? How do you perform that copy operation? I can’t see any contect menus to copy anywhere.

10

It’s not a context menu item (though maybe it should be – you can make a Feature Request!)

Click on the container to select it, then press good old CTRL-C to copy. Switch to the destination form, and press CTRL-V.

If the container’s contents completely fill the container, it may be hard to select the actual container. To make the container more accessible to the mouse, increase the spacing in/around the objects inside, temporarily.

11

Of course ctrl- c & v…thanks :grinning:

12

I think you could accomplish this by just changing the form’s html template from “standard-page.html” to “Custom HTML”:

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