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

Implementing an onboard database

In the previous section, we had a look at the persistence capabilities built into every FireDAC dataset. This is a really useful technique when you need to save and load back your datasets, possibly keeping the actual state (including local modifications).

However, this is not the equivalent of having an onboard or local database you can use to store a larger amount of data (the persistence mechanism is not incremental so you can actually save a large dataset, but you'll deal with it with a none-or-nothing strategy and you may spend some time waiting for the full dataset to load) or when you need to perform queries and extract (or store) data with datasets that can actually vary in shape (the columns or relation involved).

This is not really a FireDAC feature but it is the result of the combination of Delphi cross-platform support and FireDAC connectivity features; however, to add an onboard database to your applications is actually very easy.

The...