Title: How to Select a Control Parent in the Delphi Form Designer
When designing forms (frames) for your Delphi application, you often use container type controls such as a TPanel or TGroupBox to hold other controls.
In complex form designs, where containers are used inside other containers, it is sometimes hard to quickly "navigate" to a particular button, for example, to change its Caption.
To quickly locate (and select) a control's parent, just select the component/control whose parent you wish to find and press the ESCape key.
Since the overal parent of all the controls on a form is the form; this procedure can be used repeatedly: finally the Form is selected.
Of course, when a component on a form is selected at design time, the Object Inspector displays its (published) properties and allows you to edit them.
Note 1: When you set the Align property to alClient the control will fill its entire parent. This way to select a control's parent is especially useful in such situations.
Note 2: The Delphi IDE's "Structure View" shows the hierarchy of components displayed on the form. You can double-click a component to select it on the form.