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

Customizing TGrid and TStringGrid

Customization of TGrid and TStringGrid can be done in the standard FMX way: by editing the style of the objects (when ControlType is set to Styled). This will allow you to change the general aspect of the components and possibly add some other element to the list. Another way to provide some customization to grid controls is to register your own column classes or handle the OnDraw* events they expose.

A much more advanced customization would be to provide other presentations for the grids or customize the style of controls used in the standard columns but, as already said, this is an advanced topic and a bit beyond the scope of this book.

In this section, we discussed grids, which are popular components (especially with respect to desktop platforms) for presenting data to the user in a visual manner. In the next section, we are going to encounter components acting as containers of other visual components, thereby improving and facilitating the general...