Delphi: TFrame error No frames are available to insert

Question

It happened to me, that the Delphi XE6 IDE forgot all of the TFrame descendants that I created in the past.

More specifically, when I click on Standard -> Frames, the dialog for choosing my frames does not show anymore.

Instead, it shows the following error message:

No frames are available to insert. New frames may be created from the File|New|Other selections..

Is there a way to remedy the situation?

EDIT1 Steps to reproduce are sadly unavailable: I am honestly unsure how this happened, but it did. I think there was maybe a culprit when upgrading from certain versions of Delphi to another. As I did this upgrade multiple times over time, I remember starting the project in Delphi 7, then there were some versions which I don't remember which ones, the last two versions I used were XE2 and until now is XE6.

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Edit2 This happens if the frame(s) was(were) created with a Delphi version before XE2.

Answer 1

The reason for the problem is in changes to the .dproj file when the Firemonkey framework was added. To distinguish frames made for a vcl from frames made for fmx a line was added to the .dproj files as below. To make the correction to the .dproj file do as follows:

1. Close the Delphi IDE.

2. Open the .dproj file with a text editor of your choice.

3. Look up the TFrame one by one.

4. Let's suppose the following is your TFrame section:

   <DCCReference Include="Results.pas">
       <Form>FrameResults</Form>
       <DesignClass>TFrame</DesignClass>
   </DCCReference>
   

5. The fix is to add the following line into that section:

       <FormType>dfm</FormType>
   

(in fmx projects the line is <FormType>fmx</FormType>)

Answer 2

I had this happen; in my case it was far simpler.

I had one fmx project that had some frames and a vcl project that didn't in a single project group (different sub directories).

If I opened a fmx unit and tried to add a frame from the component menu, but had the vcl project as the compile target then I got this message. Changing the compile target to the application that contains the unit I opened and the collection of frames stopped the error.

Answer 3

There seems to be a bug in the IDE. Specifically, IDE offers IOTASourceEditor interface, which has CreateWriter method to obtain a IOTAEditWriter interface.

Some IDE extension may use methods of IOTAEditWriter interface to (for example) edit content of .dpr file (basically, just a series of .DeleteTo and .Insert is enough). Apparently this is somehow forces IDE to corrupt .dproj file.

Answer 4

I had this same issue; the frame contents were not updating correctly and after updating and removing frames a few times it broke. Under the project view I removed all the frames (Right Click remove from project) and added them again (Right Click on Project -> Add)