I have created a custom frame and registered it as a component as described in "How to improve the use of Delphi Frames"
Everything started out working great and was exactly what I needed. However when opening a Project Group with my Frame Package and my main project things break down.
When I close and re-open my project in the IDE I get errors when reading in my published properties from the DFM. It is your typical "Property XX cannot be found; Ignore, Cancel, Ignore All" error.
If I ignore all the errors the components reverts back to behaving like a frame. For example I can drag the internal controls to different positions. If I remove any published properties from the Frame the load errors go away but the behavior in the IDE is still frame like instead of component like.
This seems to be tied to the fact that I have a project group set that contains my main executable, the package with the frames, and the design package with the frame registration code. If I open the main project by itself my forms open without any errors and the registered frame behaves as desired/expected.
It's like the IDE is getting confused and finding the frame in the loaded project before finding the registered package.
One obvious solution is to not use a project group and just work with these separately, or instead of using a frame convert this to a true component. I'm hoping there is a way to keep using frames to visually design components and keep them in a project group (I like being able to do a Build-All and know everything is rebuilt at once)