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 grid control  TLinkGridToDataSource

Even if lists (TListView, TListBox) are the most appropriate controls for rendering data on mobile platforms, FMX also provides grids, as we saw in Chapter 4, Discovering Lists and Advanced Components. In that chapter, we provided a brief overview of how to manually provide data to grids, while also describing how to customize some of the UI elements of the grids.

If we have a BindSource (that is, a dataset and TBindSourceDB), then we can populate grids via LiveBindings:

Figure 6.18

As shown in the preceding screenshot, you can simply drag the * box of EmployeeBindSource (a TBindSourceDB instance) to the * box of StringGrid1 (a TStringGrid instance) to see data being rendered through the grid. All the columns will be automatically created as TStringColumn instances by default. You can edit the Columns property of the TLinkGridToDataSource object to manually define which columns to render and which kinds...