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

Binding a dataset to a list control – TLinkListControlToField

In previous chapters, we learned how lists are trending in terms of UI popularity in the mobile area with respect to grids (which used to be the key UI elements of most desktop applications). We also saw that there are two different components that implement lists in FMX: TListBox and TListView. The former can be customized easier (item per item), while the latter is more suitable for displaying several items (not identical but similar in structure).

When dealing with data binding against list controls, usually, you have a collection of data (a dataset, a list of objects, and so on) that you want to display in a single control. Each base unit of your data structure (a record, an object, and so on) will be rendered through an item of the list control. If the data structure item is complex, you may need the corresponding UI element to be rich and customize the aspect of each item according to the values of the underlying...