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My advice would be to avoid the smart panel controls that were added to the VCL a few versions ago. They claim to make it so easy but they rob you of control. I think TMS may also have some like that but I don't use them. I prefer to design what the application needs, and to work with plain panels and tabbed controls, grids, etc., with careful use of the align property. I normally use TMS. I don't know of any shortcuts to make all happen automagically, but I am ready to be told of one by someone else here!

Based on experience I am against this type of data storage for several reasons: - Some database engines can not search in BLOB fields. Now it might not be an issue in the beginning but it makes investigating data corruption / debugging processing issues a living nightmare - Downloading blob fields are slow, no matter what. Especially over the network. In our production databases I can select hundreds of thousands of rows with 150+ columns but only a fraction of that 2 fields: an ID and a BLOB storing an XML - Database engines are robust, they were built for having columns. While it can be hard / intimidating to see the relations at first time, they have no issues handling a larger number of columns - Unless the DB engine has built-in JSON support, you'll not be able to query and compare a specific value on database side, you'll always have to download and compare from code, increasing memory, network and CPU usage of your program. Considering a well-fed metal (our slang for a server with enough resource + overhead) running the database, this will always be significantly slower than letting the DB engine to take care of these The only reasonable case when storing a JSON / XML in a database I can see is if you receive that from an external source (like a REST server or a 3rd party sending your software some information) and you want to keep those chunks for auditing purposes. Sooner or later you'll face one of the issues I mentioned, though 🙂 We did the same about 8 years ago (only with XMLs) and now we are looking into opportunities to undo it...

Yes, I know, it was about time ...