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

Formatting data

The formatted data that's stored in the dataset may not be in the same format you want/need to use at the presentation level (UI). If you are confident with the VCL approach, you may think you can format data through the TField.DisplayFormat property (either by adding persistent fields to your dataset and setting DisplayFormat at design time or by accessing it at runtime via code), and you would be right.

However, LiveBindings comes with a more general mechanism that allows us to format data by passing it through the binding (unidirectionally or bidirectionally): using the CustomFormat and CustomParse properties.

As we saw previously when we introduced the LiveBindings expression evaluation engine, expressions can be complex. The technology supports a number of powerful functionalities, such as methods and output converters, to make expressions flexible and rich. The same expressions and functionalities are available through the CustomFormat and CustomParse properties...