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Delphi Basics

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

Changing your application's look and feel with VCL styles and without any code
Changing the style of your application at runtime
Customizing TDBGrid
Using owner-draw combos and listboxes
Making an owner-draw control aware of the VCL styles
Creating a stack of embedded forms
Manipulating JSON
Manipulating and transforming XML documents
I/O in the 21st century—knowing the streams
Creating a Windows Service
Associating a file extension with your application on Windows
Being coherent with the Windows look and feel using TTaskDialog
The amazing TFDTable—indices, aggregations, views, and SQL
ETL made easy—TFDBatchMode
Data integration made easy—TFDLocalSQL

Changing your application's look and feel with VCL styles

Visual Component Library (VCL) styles are a major new entry in the latest versions of Delphi. They were introduced in Delphi XE2 and are still one of the lesser-known features for good old Delphi developers. However, as business people say, looks matter, so the look and feel of your application could be one of the reasons to choose your product over another from a competitor. Consider that, with a few mouse clicks, you can apply many different styles to your application to change the look and feel of it. So, why not to give it a try?

A style is a set of graphical details that define the look and feel of a VCL application. A style allows you to change the appearance of every part and state of VCL controls.

Getting ready

VCL styles can be used to revamp an old application or to create a new one with a non-standard GUI. VCL styles are a completely different beast to FireMonkey styles. They are both styles, but with completely different approaches and behaviors.

To get started with VCL styles, we'll use a new application. So, let's create a new VCL application and drag and drop some components onto the main form (for example, two TButton controls, one TListBox, one TComboBox, and a couple of TCheckBox).

You can now see the resulting form that is running on my Windows 10 machine:

Figure 1.1: A form without style

How to do it...

Now, we've got to apply a set of nice styles by following these steps:

Go to Project | Options from the menu. Then, in the resultant dialog, go to Application | Appearance and select all the styles that we want to include in our application.
If you use the Preview button, the IDE shows a simple demo form with some controls, and we can get an idea about the final result of our styled form. Feel free to experiment and choose the style or set of styles that you like. Only one style at a time can be used, but we can link the necessary resources inside the executable and select the proper one at runtime.
After selecting all the required styles from the list, we've got to select one in the combobox at the bottom. This style will be the default style for our form and it will be loaded as soon as the application starts. You can delay this choice and make it at runtime using code, if you prefer.

Click on OK, hit F9 (or go to Run | Run), and your application will be styled:

Figure 1.2: The same form as Figure 1.1 but with the Iceberg Classico style applied

How it works...

Selecting one or more styles from Project | Options | Application | Appearance will cause the Delphi linker to link the style resource into your executable. It is possible to link many styles into your executable, but you can use only one style at a time. So, how does Delphi know which style you want to use when there are more than one? If you check the Project file (the file with the .dpr extension) by going to Project | View Source Menu (for shortcut lovers, Ctrl + V with the project selected in Project Manager), you can see where and how this little bit of magic happens.

The following lines are the interesting section:

begin 
  Application.Initialize; 
  Application.MainFormOnTaskbar := True; 
  TStyleManager.TrySetStyle('Iceberg Classico'); 
  Application.CreateForm(TMainForm, MainForm); 
  Application.Run; 
end

When we selected the Iceberg Classico style as the default style, the Delphi IDE added a line just before the creation of the main form, setting the default style for all the applications using TStyleManager.TrySetStyle static methods.

TStyleManager is a very important class when you deal with VCL styles. We'll see more about it in an upcoming recipe, where you'll learn how to change styles at runtime.

There's more...

Delphi and C++Builder 10.2 Tokyo come with 39 VCL Styles available in the folder (with a standard installation) at C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\19.0\Redist\styles\vcl\.

Embarcadero provides an additional eight premium styles that are available in the VCL premium style pack: https://cc.embarcadero.com/item/30492.

Moreover, it is possible to create your own styles or modify existing ones using the Bitmap Style Designer. You can access it by going to Tools | Bitmap Style Designer Menu.

For more details on how to create or customize a VCL style, visit http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/Creating_a_Style_using_the_Bitmap_Style_Designer.

The Bitmap Style Designer also provides test applications to test VCL styles.

Key benefits

Get to grips with Delphi to build and deploy various cross-platform applications

Design and deploy real-world apps by implementing a single source codebase

Build robust and optimized GUI applications with ease

Description

Delphi is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development on different platforms, saving you the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities. Delphi Cookbook begins with the basics of Delphi and gets you acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, Unicode encodings, and various types of streams. You’ll then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and run-time type information (RTTI). As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll understand Delphi RTL functions, use FireMonkey in a VCL application, and cover topics such as multithreading, using aparallel programming library and deploying Delphi on a server. You’ll take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules, join the mobile revolution with FireMonkey, and learn to build data-driven mobile user interfaces using the FireDAC database access framework. This book will also show you how to integrate your apps with Internet of Things (IoT). By the end of the book, you will have become proficient in Delphi by exploring its different aspects such as building cross-platforms and mobile applications, designing server-side programs, and integrating these programs with IoT.

What you will learn

Develop visually stunning applications using FireMonkey

Deploy LiveBinding effectively with the right object-oriented programming (OOP) approach

Create RESTful web services that run on Linux or Windows

Build mobile apps that read data from a remote server efficiently

Call platform native API on Android and iOS for an unpublished API

Manage software customization by making better use of an extended RTTI

Integrate your application with IOT

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Considering the value of time, if only one solution works, that pays for the book in time saved. The book is better than others books of this kind in trms of formatting, editing, and headings.

Delphi Cookbook: Recipes to master Delphi for IoT integrations, cross-platform, mobile and server-side development , Third Edition

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Delphi Cookbook

Delphi Basics

Introduction

Changing your application's look and feel with VCL styles

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

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