Book Image

Expert Delphi

By : Paweł Głowacki
Book Image

Expert Delphi

By: Paweł Głowacki

Overview of this book

Delphi is the most powerful Object Pascal IDE and component library for cross-platform native app development. It enables building natively compiled, blazingly fast apps for all major platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux. If you want to build server-side applications, create web services, and have clear GUIs for your project, then this book is for you. The book begins with a basic primer on Delphi helping you get accustomed to the IDE and the Object Pascal language and will then quickly move on to advanced-level concepts. Through this book, we’ll help you understand the architecture of applications and will teach you the important concepts of the FireMonkey library, show you how to build server-side services, and enable you to interact with the Internet of Things. Towards the end, you will learn to integrate your app with various web services and deploy them. By the end of the book, you will be able to build powerful, cross-platform, native apps for iOS and Android with a single code base.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Using custom styles

If we do not want to use a built-in style, we can always use a custom style. The Delphi installation comes with a number of custom styles. In Delphi 10.2 on Windows 10, FireMonkey custom styles are installed into the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\19.0\Styles directory. FireMonkey styles are files with the *.style extension. If we preview a FireMonkey style file with a text viewer, we will see that its content looks very much like a form file that we design with Form Designer inside the IDE.

It is good practice not to put non-visual components such as stylebooks directly on the form, but on a dedicated data module instead. Select File | New | Other from the main menu. In the New Items dialogs, select the Delphi Files category and choose to add a new Data Module to the project:

New Data Module in New Items dialog

Save the unit as uDMStyles. Change...