Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

Arranging components with TLayout

The TLayout component is a simple container for FMX visual components. It is rendered as a dashed rectangle at design time, but at runtime, it is completely invisible (transparent).

One of the most straightforward uses of TLayout is to group components together: all components inside the same container share the same positioning system, relative to the upper-left corner of the container. When you move the container, all the contained components move as well. If you change visibility in relation to the container, for example, setting the Visible property to False, the container and all its content will no longer be rendered to the user. Contained objects will retain the ability to have their own visibility that will be combined with that of the parents. This combination also applies to other properties such as Opacity and rotations applied to the components.

For example, if we put a TButton instance inside TLayout and we set the...