How can I see who triggered an action in Delphi?

Question

When a TAction event fires, the \"Sender\" is always the action itself. Usually that\'s the most useful, but is it somehow possible to find out who triggered the action\'s OnExe

Answer 1

I have a bunch of panels and I want to let the user right click any of those panels and perform a "delete file" action. So, I have a single pop-up menu associated with all those panels. This is how I find out which panel was right clicked:

(Note: I put lots of comments to clearly explain how it works. But if you don't like it, you can compactify the code to 2 lines (see the second procedure)).

So, if you have actions assigned to that pop-up menu:

procedure Tfrm.actDelExecute(Sender: TObject);
VAR
  PopMenu: TPopupMenu;
  MenuItem: TMenuItem;
  PopupComponent: TComponent;
begin
 { Find the menuitem associated to this action }
 MenuItem:= TAction(Sender).ActionComponent as TMenuItem;  { This will crash and burn if we call this from a pop-up menu, not from an action! But we always use actions, so.... }

 { Was this action called by keyboard shortcut? Note: in theory there should be no keyboard shortcuts for this action if the action can be applyed to multiple panels. We can call this action ONLY by selecting (right click) a panel! }
 if MenuItem = NIL then
  begin
   MsgError('This action should not be called by keyboard shortcuts!');
   EXIT;
  end;

 { Find to which pop-up menu this menuitem belongs to }
 PopMenu:= (MenuItem.GetParentMenu as TPopupMenu);

 { Find on which component the user right clicks }
 PopupComponent := PopMenu.PopupComponent;

 { Finally, access that component }
 (PopupComponent as TMonFrame).Delete(FALSE);
end;

If you only have a simple pop-up menu (no actions assigned):

procedure Tfrm.actDelHddExecute(Sender: TObject);
VAR PopupComponent: TComponent;
begin
 PopupComponent := ((Sender as TMenuItem).GetParentMenu as TPopupMenu).PopupComponent;
 (PopupComponent as TMonFrame).Delete(TRUE);
end;

You can put all that code in a single function that returns a TPanel and call it like this:

procedure Tfrm.actDelWallExecute(Sender: TObject);
begin
 if GetPanelFromPopUp(Sender) <> NIL
 then GetPanelFromPopUp(Sender).Delete(FALSE);
end;