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

Testing at design time and using it at runtime

Now, you can test your FormatFloat method. Just drop a TBindingsList component onto a form and open the editor for the Methods property to check whether your method is listed.

Just drop a BindSource (TBindSourceDB or TPrototypeBindSource) so that you have some data (with a floating-point value, of course) and try to use the FormatFloat function in a LiveBindings expression (beware that most parts of the LiveBindings expression engine are case-sensitive, even if this may sound unusual to a Pascal developer).

The following screenshot shows an example of how to use our newly introduced method:

Figure 6.12

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that I've added three expressions to bind the value of FloatField1 (a data generator within my PrototypeBindSource1) to three different text items in our TListView, each with a different CustomFormat property value making use of the FormatFloat function:

  • The first (for Text1) simply determines...