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

Introducing BindSources

Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the concept of scope, which is tied to the ability of the LiveBindings expression engine and helps it deal with specific identifiers (such as constant names, variable names, functions, and other constructs that have a role in the expression). BindSource components can be used to implement a scope for the LiveBindings engine, thus making new identifiers available in expressions.

Let's say you have a TDataSet descendant and you want to show data from the dataset in the UI. What you are likely willing to do is write expressions involving the dataset and a certain UI element. As we mentioned previously, we need to make the dataset available to the expression engine through a specific scope. However, we are not talking about the static properties of the dataset itself.

Here, we need a more dynamic way to inspect the dataset and its specific structure in terms of data fields. Here's where TBindSourceDB comes to the rescue...