Frame controls are used to provide an identifiable grouping for other controls. For example, you can use frame controls to subdivide a form functionally or to separate groups of option button controls. In most cases, frames are used passively to group other controls.

With 3D Active Button Magic you can now add an enhanced graphical look and responsiveness to frames in your forms, as in the picture below.

Set the Style property to STYLE_FRAME and the control will automatically transform from a button into a frame.

Note that, starting from its version 8, 3D Active Button Magic acts as a real control container: simply set its Style property to one of the container-compatible styles (STYLE_LABEL, STYLE_FRAME and STYLE_PICTURE) and start inserting contained controls.

(For more details on button styles, see How to change the button style. For more detail on setting button properties, see How to use the control in your projects).

It is easy to add a title to a frame, here positioned at Left Top.

But text can be added to any one of nine positions on a frame, here "Choose Please" is added to Left Bottom.

Another feature, added starting from version 8, is the possibility to create hollow frames which, for example, will let display an underlying picture, like in the sample below:

this effect can be obtained setting the HollowFrame property to TRUE and, in order to generate an optimal anti-aliasing with the picture below, setting the SurfaceTransparentFactor to 1 or higher (in the screenshot above it has been set to 128).

NOTE 1: Be aware that the use of the HollowFrame property brings one small limitation: you cannot add, inside the hollow frame, windowless controls like Visual Basic 6 labels and images because they will not appear at runtime; you can by-bass the problem in two ways:

use only labels and images created using 3D Active Button Magic with the Style property set to STYLE_LABEL or STYLE_PICTURE

at design-time, create Visual Basic 6 labels and images outside of the hollow frame (so they won't be created as child controls of the frame), then move them inside the frame area.

NOTE 2: Using the control as a frame control can cause in some situation a flashing of the contained controls when changing the input focus: in order to remove this unwanted effect, simply remove the frame control from the TAB order (for example in Visual Basic 6 you can set the control's TabStop property to False).