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

Dynamic appearance

Setting DynamicAppearance value for ItemAppearance provides you with a similar experience to the Custom one, but you can determine the collection of drawables implementing the appearance. This means that you may add three or four text items, a number of images, and one or more accessory items implementing a very tailored representation of your data.

The following screenshot shows a portion of the Delphi IDE while editing the dynamic appearance used in the previous example:

Figure 4.6

As you can see, the (regular) Item node of the appearance is selected in the Structure view and its properties are shown in the Object Inspector window. In Form Designer (the upper-right portion of the preceding screenshot), you can see the list view with Design mode enabled and, in LiveBindings Designer, you can have a representation of how the data is provided to the list view.

The preceding screenshot contains some meaningful peculiarities:

  • Object...