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

TListView

The second list control we'll cover in this book is the TListView control. The general concept behind this control (a representation of data in list form) is quite different from that of TListBox (a collection of visual items).

 TListView is a TStyledControl descendant. It is not a direct descendant; we have some layers of inheritance between the two, including TListViewBase. It is the first real UI control in the chain, able to use an adapter to mediate between data and its representation, and implementing basic functionality, such as scrolling and drawing TPresentedListView, which enables native control implementation, and TAppearanceListView, which enables dynamic appearances for list items (basically enabling the developer to fully customize an item's appearance and build one directly in the IDE or by code).

Listview controls have a really advanced implementation, and covering too many internal mechanisms and capabilities...