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

Providing data for the list

Before starting with some basic examples, we have to deal with the fact that you can't manually create list view items at design time. TListview has been designed to work well with the LiveBinding technology (I briefly introduced LiveBindings in Chapter 1, Introducing the FireMonkey Framework, and will go into more detail on this in Chapter 6, Implementing Data Binding. If something is unclear at this point, please explore LiveBindings in more detail in Chapter 6Implementing Data Binding, and then come back). So basically, we have some source of data providing a list of items and then we have to manipulate its representation to build our UI element.

I am going to use the TPrototypeBindSource component to have a data source available at design time. If you are unfamiliar with this component, you can think of it more or less like an in-memory dataset of randomly generated data.

In Figure 4.2, you can see a TListView&...