How to Dynamically Add Items (Holding Custom Properties) to a TPopUp 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;

Notes:

• In the above code, one item is added to the PopupMenu1 component. Note that we assigned an integer value to the Tag property. The Tag property (every Delphi component has it) is designed to allow a developer to assign an arbitrary integer value stored as part of the component.
• The GetTickCount API function retrieves the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since Windows was started.
• For the OnClick event handler we assigned "PopupItemClick" - the name of the function with the *correct* signature.

Important: when dynamically added item is clicked, the "PopupItemClick" will be executed. In order to differentiate between one or more run-time added items (all executing the code in PopupItemClick) we can use the Sender parameter:

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 (run-time created) 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 "exetended" 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;

Note: to actually open up the default Web Browser you can use the Value property as a parameter to a ShellExecuteEx API function.

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