Adding properties

Properties of a component that you would like to have visible in the Object Inspector window must be declared as published. Properties are attributes that determine an object's status and behavior. A property is a name that is mapped to read and write methods or access data directly. This means, when you read or write a property, you are accessing a field or calling a method of the object. For example, let us add a FileName property to TMessageLog , which is the name of the file that messages will be written to. The actual field of the object that will store this data will be named fFileName.

To the TMessageLog private declaration section, add:

  fFileName: String;

To the TMessagLog published declaration section, add:

  property FileName: String read fFileName write fFileName;

With these changes, when the packages are compiled and installed, the property FileName will be visible in the Object Inspector window when the TMessageLog declaration is added to a form in a project....