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

Building grid layouts with TGridLayout

Another typical situation when dealing with component placement is having a number of equally sized entries to be arranged in a grid model. The TGridLayout component will enforce the sizing of all contained objects to be equal to its ItemHeight and ItemWidth property values.

Items will be placed one beside the other, filling rows (or columns, depending on the actual value of the Orientation property) within the boundaries of this container component. Similar to the TFlowLayout behavior, row/column management is automatic, but contained elements are all the same size. Some properties (Position, Width, and Height) of the contained elements will be automatically set while other properties will be explicitly ignored (Align).

In the following screenshot, you can see a simple example where ItemHeight and ItemWidth are set to 100, and the contained elements are TRectangle and TCircle components whose Margin value have been set to 10 on all sides...