RCrandall

I'm still not seeing KSVC 7 in GetIt for 11.3 as of today.  The link above seems to indicate that they are restoring the GetIt libraries as fast as they can but this one is not there yet.  This is for a D11.3 install from the latest ISO.

Hopefully it will not be much longer now.

I'm pretty quiet but I too visit every day and am always interested in the high-quality discussion here.  Every now and then I ask a question and have had wonderful responses.  Thank you for all your hard work and all the best going forward.

Best, Rob C

I have most of my third-party libraries converted or updated already.  I just need this one and JEDI JCL/JVCL to support Delphi 12 and I am good to go.  Is anyone aware of any specific news about D12 support in OmniThreadLibrary?

Thanks, Rob C

18 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

It started with the request to expand the unit scope names, which gave a good boost to compile time in some cases. The idea of uses clause grouping and sorting crept in my mind when I noticed difficulties to quickly scan the list of used units. With a sorted and grouped uses clause the used libraries are clearly visible immediately. So its partly for compilation speed as well as a neat look (some call it OCD).

"Expand unit scope names" - that was it. Thanks for the speedy reply and I appreciate all the other comments too.

Rob C

I am returning to MMX after a long break and I'm exploring it all again.  I dimly recall seeing that the order of the Uses clauses can affect compilation speed, a problem I'm having, but I'm far from sure of that.  Is this the benefit of formatting the list of used units?  Or is to improve readability, or some other reason?

Inquiring minds want to know, thanks, Rob C

I too would love to see a solution for this.  I have read up on the problem but have no practical way to tackle it yet and I don't have the smarts to just create something from first principles.  I would pay good money for a utility that just does it and could clean up my code base (20 years and counting) in a day.  Sigh.

The absence of licensing info is troubling, now that you mention it.  My friend has the paid-for source but I will alert him about this aspect of it  Now that I have turned this up his interest in it seems to have cooled off anyway but I think he should move from D5 to something a little more current just on general principles and someday he might well.

I have had the odd component orphaned on me in the past but it was always either open-sourced (e.g. THmtlViewer by Dave Baldwin) or there was something else I could easily jump to.  It feels a bit odd to be caught out like this and not be able to recommend a suitable current alternative, but I guess that happens and it finally caught up with me with this one.

Thanks, Rob

Fr0st.Brutal - I'm new to this and I just assumed it was usable if it was on GitHub.  I spent no time (yet) on the licensing nuances.  What do you see that sets off alarm bells?  I want to respect the legal rights of all involved of course.

Thanks, Rob C

Holy smokes, that was fast!  I am feeling chagrined that it was in fact open sourced and I did not spot that when I looked.  Thanks very much for this!

I will grab it now and commence to play, Rob C

There was a VCL component called TGlobe during the Delphi 5 to 2006 era that has since disappeared.  I know someone who as the full source for the D5 version and is still using Delphi 5 because of this.  I rather incautiously offered to see what I can do to help. My ‘evening and weekend’ project is to see if I can update it to Delphi 11.

TGlobe is still listed on Delphi Super Page, but the author has disappeared and the TGlobe web site is for sale.  There is no sign that the code has been open sourced.

I have been allowed to see the source for version 4.07, and the last version on the Delphi Super Page is 5.11.  If anyone has 5.11 with source, I would pay your $50 US for it just to get that much further along.  Failing this, I need to do this the hard way and I’m definitely out of my sphere of competence.  I used Delphi 5 back in the day but don’t have it now, and the only book I have that might be relevant is Ray Konopka’s “Developing Custom Delphi Components” from 1996.  This might in fact be all I need, but if there are web resources that anyone can point to, it would be helpful to know.

This is not a make or break project, but if I can help this person I would like to.  Does anyone out there have TGlobe sitting on their harddrive, or know of a killer tutorial on upgrading components from the distant past?

Thanks in advance, Rob C

So I now see.  It was nice to know that I could get help here and also that I still had enough smarts to figure it out on my own (eventually).  About half an hour of doing that I noticed that there was an update and lo and behold, this issue seems to have been addressed in it too.  Everything just came together!

My role is to figure this all out for the rest of our dev team and now I can just smile and say "get all the updates first and everything will be like the last times".  That is my true goal here.

THMTLViewer has been great for us and I resisted changing away from it unless there was a really good reason.  It looks like we can stay with it for a while yet.

Thanks all, Rob C

Yes, all seems to be good with these two libraries now in D 11.2.  Now I can install the other 3rd party items and give it a proper try!

Writing this out at length clarified my own thinking and helped me spot the problem.

Cheers all, Rob C

Hey, I think I just figured it out.  My 11.2 library path for looking up DCP files was mangled.  It looks like this:

The path is missing "\$(Platform)" at the end.  I bet that is all this was.  Testing now.

I'm looking again and I see that it installed fine as recently as Delphi 11.1.

Deep breath -

In my case, I also use the AlphaControls AlphaSkins library and I want the HTMLViewer to use the AlphaSkins scroll bars to keep things pretty.  No problem, that is why we have the source and I changed the HTMLViewer code to use the desired AC scrollbar code.  That introduced a dependency on the AlphaControls code but that is fine.  It has worked for years through many successive versions of Delphi up to 11.1 inclusive.  I should mention that I switched my program to 64-bit along the way.

Now with 11.2, I am following my standard installation of libraries procedure (carefully documented by me and running some 22 pages in Word now) and I'm having a problem.  The exact proximate cause of my error is that 

1. I have compiled and installed AlphaControls in both 32-bit and 64-bit as always.

2. HTMLViewer needs to find the dependent 64-bit dcp file that was output by AlphaControls 64-bit, and

3. It is looking in the wrong place and getting the 32-bit version instead.  It then stops dead with the following:

The path in the error message is the correct one for the 32-bit dcp.  The 64-bit dcp is in that same path plus '\Win64\' just like all the other 64-bit dcps.  For some reason, Delphi, 11.2 (or something else) does not know to look in that \Win64\ folder even though it seems to do just that for every other 64-bit dcp it needs.  I tried recompiling everything and changing up the order, etc. but no joy.

I've been using Delphi for a while but this is new to me and I'm a bit flummoxed.  I just went back to an older VM with Delphi 11.1 installed and everything worked fine at the time.  This leads me to suspect something changed in D 11.2 in this regard, but how the heck do I figure that out?  I suppose I could contact support at Embarcadero but I would much prefer to solve it on my own or get some help without bothering them.  Or I could stiffen my upper lip and finally get around to figuring out how Emb handles bug reports and do a proper job.  My concerns though about relying on an unsupported HTMLViewer library remain because even if I find the solution to this immediate problem, the writing may be on the wall for other problems down the road.

Hmmm, Rob

I have had great success over the years with HTMLViewer.  It was done by Dave Baldwin IIRC and then eventually open-sourced and put on GitHub at https://github.com/BerndGabriel/HtmlViewer.  There is a Delphi 10 version of it on GitHub but I'm not able to get that to install in 11.2.  I believe I got it working in 11.0 and 11.1 but for some reason I am blocked now.  It is one of those situations where there is a long succession of errors that are incomprehensible and just plain frustrating.

Does anyone know if there is another version of it out there I can look at, or if anyone has gotten it to work with 11.2, or what the best replacement might be?  I already have HTML Controls but don't use it yet as it would be a lot of work to convert to.  I'm starting to think that might be my best solution though as it makes me nervous to rely on unsupported components.  The GitHub version hasn't been updated in three years.

Thanks in advance for any information or suggestions on what I should do.

Best, Rob Crandall

This book looks like it is going to be invaluable to me and my team.  I have a 20 year old project and nearly everything in the book applies to it.  I'm buying three more copies to give to my co-developers.

Bought it!  This looks like something I can really use!

Thanks, Rob C

Thanks for the name and the tip!

I'm looking at the IDE for 10.4.2 and specifically at the part that is circled in red in the attached screenshot.  Does anyone know what this is called so that I can Google it for troubleshooting?  I've drawn a complete blank!

Normally this feature would tell you which method you are currently in, but in 90% of the cases for me it is blank.  This is true in Delphi 11 too.  The one time I went to take a screenshot it worked!

For all I know there is a setting somewhere, or some tweak I can make, that will make it work more reliably but I don't even know what to call it to get started searching.  It would be wonderful if it worked reliably.

Thanks all, Rob Crandall

Hello everyone.  I'm happy to report that Mr. Uwe Rabbe got me going on this.   I shared some further details with him and he was able to come up with code that worked.  Darned if I know what is different that caused the problem, but heck, it works, and from this solid foundation I can now work outwards and learn the rest and perhaps even identify what my original problem traced back to.

Thanks Uwe!  I genuflect in your general direction.

Regards, Rob Crandall

2 hours ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

Don't these libs implement server side while OP needs client?

General hint: if you have some REST soft working and some not, get the dumps of their requests and compare. That will be much more useful than any guessing. curl can dump all traffic with some options but I'm not sure about Delphi client... still, you can use Wireshark (traffic sniffer) for this or some special proxy.

I too am a big fan of visualizing the raw data and I have been trying to do just this.  Fishing that info out of the components is harder than it looks when they are wrappers for OS functions but something like Wireshark could be the real answer.  Thanks for reminding me about it.  I've never used it but it might be time to get acquainted with it!

Thanks, Rob C

P.S.  I love your list of Delphi stuff btw and visit your website regularly to see what is new.

2 hours ago, Kryvich said:

There are several free and opensource REST libraries available so you don't have to start from scratch. I would recommend

• DMVCFramework --  a popular and powerful framework for web solution in Delphi. Supports RESTful and JSON-RPC APIs development.
• WiRL -- RESTful Library for Delphi.
• mORMot -- Synopse mORMot ORM/SOA/MVC framework

See example applications to a specific framework.

Thank you, I will check this out!  I'm hoping that a combination of helpful sample code will put me on the right track!  This gives me another three to play with.

Rob C

Yes, I believe I do have that info.  The people at the server end are part of a related company and trying to help but are too busy to really do much.  They pointed me to their internal dev wiki that has brief info, and then something called Swagger that I believe uses WSDL to show all the nitty-gritty details complete with CURL examples of usage.  This took a while to parse out but I am able to get results in Swagger and the equivalent code, as near as I can make it, fails in Delphi.  It could be something super simple or something super complex - I just cannot tell.   The thing is, this is a commercial entity and I can't just share this info to the world.

I'm using 10.4.2 under Windows 10 btw.

This is a new experience for me.  I'm wondering now if I should try out an online service-for-hire place for Delphi programmers.   Does this sound like a good idea or is this a well-travelled route to the bad place?  I just don't know.  

Thanks, Rob

I'm new to REST and trying to communicate with web services generally.  I have lots of experience with other areas of coding in Delphi but no background whatever for web services.  I now have a task to get a web service client going and have done a complete face plant.  Often I used to be able to get a new library of components and work out from the docs and the properties/methods of the components what needed to be done.  It required a bit of patience and Googling but it worked.  This isn't working this time - the new task is just a whole order of complexity above what I have time for now.

By any chance, has anyone used the standard TRestClient / TRestRequest / TRestResponse components in real life?  Can you possibly point me to a good write-up and/or working code that illustrates its use?  I feel like I have looked everywhere and come up with just fragments, most of which don't seem to work.

In the alternative, if anyone knows their way around this area and had the time to help me directly, I could come up with some money to make it happen.  I have a clear requirement I'm trying to satisfy and I've got a test program that connects to the web service (or at least appears to) and I can send and parse the results of GET requests successfully.  I'm flummoxed trying to get the first POST request to work though.  I appear not to have set up encoding correctly or some other gotcha because of my lack of background knowledge.  My specific stopper right now is a "403, Forbidden: Content type 'multipart\/form-data' is not supported."  I'm stuck on that and need help!

Thanks in advance to anyone with suggestions or can help in some way, cheers, Rob Crandall

Cool!  While you were doing that I manned up and tried to find the problem myself.  I updated the GR32_Compiler.inc file with some Delphi 11 info along the lines of the previous updated and darned if it didn't compile!  I was astonished.

Anyway, thank you Anders and I will very cheerfully use your package.  My main hope was that Delphi 11 would not have the endless IDE problems with Code Insight and related, and so far it is working perfectly!  More astonishment!  Some days that start badly just end up being good days after all.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Cheers, Rob C