Lachlan Gemmell

As I said last week, if you have a legal license for QuickReports 6 then email support@qbssoftware.com to request the installer for Delphi 10.4. If you won't take that advice then I'm sorry but I have to assume you don't have a legal license for QuickReports and I don't think anyone here will want to help you any further.

When FireDAC was first acquired by Embarcadero there was no way for third parties to add drivers as the list of registered drivers was hard coded. Is that still the case? There is reason to believe that since then the architecture may have been opened up for third parties as evidenced by the CData FireDAC Components and to a lesser extent the recent Embarcadero Encrypted SQLite FireDAC driver available through GetIt. Are these "first class" FireDAC drivers or do they hack their way into the architecture in some semi-supported way? If they are "first class" FireDAC drivers is the mechanism they use to register themselves with FireDAC available to all, or did CData have to get specific code changes made by Embarcadero in FireDAC for their drivers (and their drivers only) to be recognised?

An installer for QuickReport 6 for 10.4 Sydney does exist however you cannot get it through the QuickReport website (you actually can't get any version through the QR website, their download system is broken). If you email QuickReport support however they will send you a link for a 10.4 installer.

I haven't confirmed it with Embarcadero but I heard they no longer have a bundling deal with CData. I looked into those connectors but decided against using them for licensing reasons. Look closely at the license for those bundled connectors. They are only allowed to be used for your internal software. If you redistribute your software to any third party you have to buy a full license from CData. OK so how much is a full license? Well for just one connector the price varies by connector but the Gmail connector for example is $799 per developer, per year. Now can you distribute to third parties with that license from CData? No you can't. That $799 connector can still only be used for internal use. So how can you distribute to anyone outside your company? The website says contact CData for further pricing. I didn't bother. Buying the full suite of connectors is somewhat more economical. You can get all their FireDAC connectors for $1999 but that's per developer, per year and still doesn't let you distribute software outside your own company. If they were $50 each and you could distribute them as you liked as with almost every other Delphi component I'd consider them. With their licensing as it stands today I find it very difficult to justify purchasing them. See here for the details from CData https://www.cdata.com/subscriptions/firedac/#faq

Good idea to make it part of MMXCE. I purchased the diff viewer back in the day but it was such a niche product I used to forget to install it when setting up a new dev VM. Looking forward to seeing the IDE integration.

Just curious, what kind of improvement did you see? I'm also suspicious that LiveBindings is not the real cause of your problems. Like Dalia said, 10-12 seconds is a very long time. I run on similar hardware to you, although inside VMs which I give only 2 cores and a max of 8GB of RAM. Even with those constraints it would never take more than 2-3 seconds to load even my largest of forms and I haven't disabled LiveBindings.

Impressive looking software, just the wrong side of the world.

If I remember correctly the DevJet Documentation Insight version that was bundled with previous IDE versions had a template that improved the appearance of the Help Insight. See here for more info from DevJet. Whether you should use the version from the DevJet site or from your XE5 I'm not sure.

The IDE/installer have trouble reaching the Embarcadero servers on old operating systems due to their out of date HTTPS encryption. If you're using one of these old operating systems you need to update the default Windows HTTPS encryption method. https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/3140245/update-to-enable-tls-1-1-and-tls-1-2-as-default-secure-protocols-in-wi

If you're using Windows 7 you might need to apply this security update. The outdated encryption in Windows 7 prevents the IDE from reaching the Embarcadero servers. https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/3140245/update-to-enable-tls-1-1-and-tls-1-2-as-default-secure-protocols-in-wi

Take a look at TFDMemTable.Data. It doesn't do exactly what you want but it's close.

There's also a problem with the IDE accessing GetIt on Win7 related to out of date OS encryption. There's instructions from Microsoft on how to rectify that.

I see the question was asking for threadsafe read-only access so I agree an TFDMemTable will be suitable for his needs.

Back in 2014 the lead architect of FireDAC confirmed it is not threadsafe. That was quite a while ago but to the best of my knowledge that has not changed.

I'd go ahead and install it, those debugger issues are a real pain. There's an uninstall for patch 2 if it does break your code. So far the only patch 2 specific compiler issue reported is related to using record constraints on generics where the record contains a managed type such as a string or a dynamic array. If you don't use record constraints on your generics (and you probably don't) then you're likely fine. To my knowledge the only library that's definitely broken so far is VSoft.Messaging. I haven't read anything that leads me to believe that Spring4D is broken.

It's all working just fine. Here's what the installer appended to my Delphi Win32 library path C:\Users\Lachlan\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\CatalogRepository\JEDICodeLibraryJCL-3.4\lib\d27\win32;C:\Users\Lachlan\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\CatalogRepository\JEDICodeLibraryJCL-3.4\source\include;C:\Users\Lachlan\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\CatalogRepository\JEDIVisualComponentLibraryJVCL-3.9\lib\D27\win32;C:\Users\Lachlan\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\CatalogRepository\JEDIVisualComponentLibraryJVCL-3.9\common;C:\Users\Lachlan\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\CatalogRepository\JEDIVisualComponentLibraryJVCL-3.9\Resources

No problems here. Correct JCL/JVCL properly installed themselves from GetIt into Delphi 10.4.

It might not be perfect yet but at least there's a path forward, rather than the hopelessly broken error insight we've been putting up with for the past 15 years. Red squiggles that go away eventually is definitive progress compared to red squiggles that had no hope of ever disappearing.

I've gone back to Embarcadero to resume my request to transfer my license to a Network Named User. Would you and @Uwe Raabe be willing to summarise the setup of your ELC servers and mention any gotchas you encountered please?

Back in January I spoke to EMBT about switching to a Network Named License. I backed out when they told me that the license agreement restricts you to just 3 installations. I knew from your blog posts that back in 2018 they weren't enforcing this restriction, but I was worried that had changed. Sounds like that's not the case?