delphi - How can I refer to a control whose name is determined at runtime?

Question

As a kind of self-study exercise, I've made a form which contains six panels in a 2x3 rectangle and I want them to switch between visible and invisible one after another. I'm trying to do so by using a for loop of some kind. I could of course write something like:

Panel1.Visible := true;
Panel1.Visible := false;
Panel2.Visible := true;
Panel2.Visible := false;
Panel3.Visible := true;
etc. etc.

But this takes quite a lot of typing and is pretty inefficient when I decide I want it to wait for 100ms between each step. For example, I'd then have to edit all the six steps to wait. This is doable for six steps, but maybe another time I want to do it a hundred times! So I'm thinking there must also be a way to use a for loop for this, where a variable varies from 1 to 6 and is used in the object identifier. So it would something like this:

for variable := 1 to 6 do begin
Panel + variable.Visible := true;
Panel + variable.Visible := false;
end;

Now, this obviously doesn't work, but I hope somebody here can tell me if this is in fact possible and if yes, how. Maybe I can use a string as the identifier? My explanation is probably pretty bad because I don't know all the technical terms but I hope the code explains something.

Answer 1

You can loop through the panel's Owner's Components array.

var
  i: Integer;
  TmpPanel: TPanel;
begin
  { This example loops through all of the components on the form, and toggles the
    Visible property of each panel to the value that is opposite of what it has (IOW,
    if it's True it's switched to False, if it's False it's switched to True). }
  for i := 0 to ComponentCount - 1 do                  
    if Components[i] is TPanel then                    
    begin
      TmpPanel := TPanel(Components[i]);
      TmpPanel.Visible := not TmpPanel.Visible;     // Toggles between true and false
    end;
end;

You can also use the FindComponent method, if you want a very specific type of component by name. For instance, if you have the 6 panels, and their names are Panel1, Panel2, and so forth:

var
  i: Integer;
  TmpPanel: TPanel;
begin
  for i := 1 to 6 do
  begin
    TmpPanel := FindComponent('Panel' + IntToStr(i)) as TPanel;
    if TmpPanel <> nil then      // We found it
      TmpPanel.Visible := not TmpPanel.Visible;
  end;
end;