New VCL Component for Delphi Developers

It's been a while since the original announcement back in June 2016, but hey, we're finally there. Today marks the release of a brand new VCL component that uses the data provider interface and FireDAC at its core. 

This enables a number of great features that were previously unavailable to Delphi developers using our “old” databound component:

Besides these product inherent features, you can now bind to any data FireDAC supports. According to Embarcadero this covers Oracle, MS SQL Server, SQLite, DB2, MySQL and PostgreSQL to name just a few. And, last not least, we got rid of the BDE dependency we had before. For our Delphi users, this is truely a giant leap forward. We decided to open source the new component and are happily accepting pull requests. Just fork the component’s source code on GitHub. Things you could work on include support for label projects (currently only list type projects are supported), support for DesignerFunctions and DesignerObjects or even support for 1:1 relations.

Due to the completely different nature of the new component, it is not a drag & drop replacement for the existing TDBL24 component. We rather looked at what our .NET component offers and tried to mimic its interface closely. Also, the project files are not interchangeable between the new components. If you start something new, we strongly suggest to have a look at the new component. However, we’ll also maintain the “old” components for a long time to come for compatibility reasons.

The new component compiles and integrates with RAD Studio 10.3 Rio. We also ship a sample that shows how to use it. Basically, you wire up the data structure in your form, including the queries and data sources to use:

In the code, all there is left then is to call the Design() or Print() method:

// ...
ListLabel.DataController.AutoMasterMode := TLlAutoMasterMode.mmAsVariables;
ListLabel.DataController.DataMember := 'Orders';

ListLabel.AutoProjectFile := 'inv_merg.lst';
ListLabel.Design;
// ...

This opens the Designer, fully fledged with report container support, drilldown support and designer real data preview:

A big special thank you goes to Andreas Mueller of Nord-Vision IT – his contributions to this project were invaluable. We look forward to your thoughts, comments and pull requests.

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2 Comments on “New VCL Component for Delphi Developers”

  1. Hi, is there any forum or discussion channel where I can connect to the developers?
    Now, more than one year later, there are still too many things missing, compared with the old BDE component, to use it productive.
    And, tables with a detail are fully loaded 6 times for one print. Four times for design. For what? Out of that two times to just register the table before design or print!

    Reply

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