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

Exploring treeviews

In this section, we are going to learn about treeviews, a commonly used component in many UI examples (a classical example being the on-disk folder structure in many operating systems' shells).

A very common data structure is the tree. Basically, data is provided with a hierarchical relationship between items so each item can be seen as a parent of other items. A typical example of this kind of nested list structure is how filesystem objects get represented (some filesystem entries that are used to call folders or directories can have children, that is, files or folders entries).

FMX has a TTreeView component suitable for representing such data structures. Basically, you can see it as a scrollable list of items where each item can contain other items. Sub-items are generally indented horizontally more than their parent and parents are generally expandable and collapsible. These characteristics make the hierarchy across items very evident to the user...