Add Items to a TPopUp Delphi Menu

When working with Menus or PopUp menus in Delphi applications, in most scenarios, you create the menu items at design-time. Each menu item is represented by a TMenuItem Delphi class. When a user selects (clicks) an item, the OnClick event is fired for you (as a developer) to grab the event and respond to it.

There may be situations when the items of the menu are not known at design time, but need to be added at run-time (dynamically instantiated).

Add TMenuItem at Run-Time

Suppose there is a TPopupMenu component named "PopupMenu1" on a Delphi form, to add an item to the popup menu you could write a piece of code as:

 var
    menuItem : TMenuItem;
 begin
   menuItem := TMenuItem.Create(PopupMenu1) ;
 
   menuItem.Caption := 'Item added at ' + TimeToStr(now) ;
 
   menuItem.OnClick := PopupItemClick;
 
   //assign it a custom integer value..
   menuItem.Tag := GetTickCount;
 
   PopupMenu1.Items.Add(menuItem) ;
 end; 

 procedure TMenuTestForm.PopupItemClick(Sender: TObject) ;
 var
    menuItem : TMenuItem;
 begin
    if NOT (Sender is TMenuItem) then
    begin
      ShowMessage('Hm, if this was not called by Menu Click, who called this?!') ;
      ShowMessage(Sender.ClassName) ;
      exit;
    end;
 
    menuItem := TMenuItem(sender) ;
    ShowMessage(Format('Clicked on "%s", TAG value: %d',[menuItem.Name, menuItem.Tag])) ;
 
 end; 

The "PopupItemClick" method first checks if the Sender is actually a TMenuItem object. If the method is executed as a result of a menu item OnClick event handler we simply show a dialog message with the Tag value being assigned when the menu item was added to the menu.

Custom String-In TMenuItem

In real-world applications, you might/would need more flexibility. Let's say that each item will "represent" a web page - a string value would be required to hold the URL of the web page. When the user selects this item you could open the default web browser and navigate to the URL assigned with the menu item.

Here's a custom TMenuItemExtended class equipped with a custom string "Value" property:

 type
   TMenuItemExtended = class(TMenuItem)
   private
     fValue: string;
   published
     property Value : string read fValue write fValue;
   end; 

Here's how to add this "extended" menu item to a PoupMenu1:

 var
    menuItemEx : TMenuItemExtended;
 begin
    menuItemEx := TMenuItemExtended.Create(PopupMenu1) ;
 
    menuItemEx.Caption := 'Extended added at ' + TimeToStr(now) ;
 
    menuItemEx.OnClick := PopupItemClick;
 
    //assign it a custom integer value..
    menuItemEx.Tag := GetTickCount;
 
    //this one can even hold a string value
    menuItemEx.Value := 'http://delphi.about.com';
 
    PopupMenu1.Items.Add(menuItemEx) ;
 end; 

Now, the "PopupItemClick" must be modified to properly process this menu item:

 procedure TMenuTestForm.PopupItemClick(Sender: TObject) ;
 var
    menuItem : TMenuItem;
 begin
    //...same as above 
 
    if sender is TMenuItemExtended then
    begin
      ShowMessage(Format('Ohoho Extended item .. here''s the string value : %s',[TMenuItemExtended(Sender).Value])) ;
    end;
 end; 

That's all. It's up to you to extend the TMenuItemExtended as per your needs. Creating custom Delphi components is where to look for help on creating your own classes/components.