corneliusdavid

7 minutes ago, Unktneemo said:

hey say that there is no problem with the software.

Yep, the software I was testing was very mature software, having run for hundreds of clients around the US for many years. And, like you noticed, some parts work fine, other parts raise errors. There may be simple software fixes to get around those--really depends on the program and what it needs to do.

I support some programs that are accessed via RDP and when I was first researching remotely running apps, I tried RemoteApp briefly but had a similar problem. While I don't recall what the exact cause of it was in that instance, it has to do with the application assuming resources are accessible in the same manner as they are when run from a standard Windows desktop--which RDP provides. It may have been something simple like checking for the screen size or something. In any case, we had to modify the program and even then only run it via RDP. I'm sure it would work through RemoteApp if it was a fairly simple program but when the Delphi code calls Windows API functions that are either not supported or return unexpected values and they aren't handled properly, weird things can happen.

Sorry I don't have a better answer but yeah, you'll need to talk to the programmers.

6 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

No need to check for existence as the internally called _UStrDelete already handles that case pretty well.

Ah Yes! I love it!

2 minutes ago, Lars Fosdal said:

I replaced shortest with most readable years ago

I agree it's not near as readable. But it was sure fun to see if I could do it!

Excellent! Glad that helped. I just found a similar property in a DevEx grid control a few weeks ago with a similar need/solution.

So here are three ideas that might help:

1. Customize the Color property of each tab (RzTabSheet) at design time (which doesn't affect the sheet's background color, just the tab color).
2. Hook into the OnChange event of the RzPageControl and set the RzTabSheet's color for the selected tab.
3. On the RzPageControl, uncheck the seFont option of the StyleElements property. I think this ignores the color that the Wedgewood Light theme would set and uses the Windows standard font color (clWindowText for this element).

Using the third option, here's what my test looks like:

If by "shortest" you're trying to keep it to one line, this will work (you have to use the Math and StrUtils units):

Result := IfThen(Pos('<', MyStr) > 0, Trim(LeftStr(MyStr, Pos('<', MyStr) - 1)), MyStr);

I'd say it's the color choices the RzPageControl chooses to use for it's background--partially because it uses a dark one for the tabs, so to make the selected one stand out, it uses a light background, which for Wedgewood, is too close to the font color.

Here's a form using the Wedgewood theme with both the Standard PageControl (on the left) and the RzPageControl (on the right):

The Sterling theme looks a little better as far as the contrast for the selected page but the whole form looks washed out (IMHO):

The Aqua Light Slight seems to work well for light-colored themes:

Just try several different themes until the control gives the right balance of colors in your application.

This doesn't directly answer your question but I did some comparison of the IOUtils paths on various platforms and learned a lot while writing this small open-source app: https://github.com/corneliusdavid/AppPaths. Maybe it will reveal some access limitations on iOS.

Which of their products? From their website:

• StyleControls: XE2+
• ImageKit: XE3+
• SmartEffects: D5+
• BusinessSkinForm: D5+

So if you're only needing the last two, then Yes!

https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Connect_to_Microsoft_SQL_Server_(FireDAC)

8 hours ago, MJBComp said:

Can you explain why when i open the Delphi Template Manager and try and delete the "if" template it won't actually remove.  It will show as deleted. But if i close the Template Manager, close and re open Delphi the "if" template is back.

Probably because the default "if" template is under C:\Program Files (x86)\... which is read-only. I'm guessing Delphi removes it from it's run-time list while it is open but re-populates the list from the files when it starts back up--and since the file itself was not deleted, re-reads it.

If you really, REALLY want that "if" template to go away, close Delphi, manually delete C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\ObjRepos\en\Code_Templates\Delphi\if.xml, then re-start Delphi.

1 hour ago, MJBComp said:

Its the "if" Delphi template causing it.  But when i delete that template the behavior still remains.  If i close Delphi and restart the template is restored back.

 

If i try and modify the "if" template and try and save it i get this error:

"Unable to create backup folder 'c:\program files(x86}\embarcadero\21.0\ObjRepos\EN\code_templates\Delphi\_history\'

Yes, this is the Live Templates feature of Delphi (one of my favorite productivity features, actually). A default set of templates gets installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\21.0\ObjRepos\en\Code_Templates\Delphi as you discovered but remember that anything under C:\Program Files (x86) is read-only by default, so renaming or changing a Live Template from Delphi might not affect the actual file--or, as you encountered, you'd get the "Unable to create backup folder" error as Delphi tries to create a backup of the template before saving the new changes (which it will also fail to do unless you're running Delphi as Administrator).

In addition to the default templates mentioned above, any new ones you create are stored in C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\code_templates\Delphi. Since your user folder IS writable, you can rename/modify/delete the templates there all you want.

You can turn off the auto-completion of the templates (which forces you to hit Ctrl+J to activate one) by going into Tools > Options > User Interface > Editor > Language, switching to the "Code Insight" tab, and unchecking "Auto complete" under "Code template completion".

OK, one more interesting thing (I keep thinking of different ways to test this...): I was running D11 DPI-aware on my High-DPI monitor and it worked fine. When I right+clicked on the data module's editor tab and selected "New Edit Window" to open the data module in a separate (non-docked) window, then moved that window to a regular-DPI monitor, that's when I started having the same problems you described: moving components then saving, moved them back. If I re-docked the floating editor window back in Delphi, the problem stopped; if I moved the entire Delphi IDE to a regular-DPI monitor, the problem also stopped.

I just encountered something somewhat related that may give a clue--and definitely ties in with DPI. In attempting to replicate your problem of non-visual components being repositioned, I opened up a data module in Delphi 11 and tried moving the components around and saving to see what would happen. Just now, I opened that data module up in Delphi 10.4 (after saving it in D11) and saw the components had been spaced out and the data module "form" itself was twice the size. I also noticed that D11 had added the PixelsPerInch property to the data module (which Delphi 10.4 had to strip out upon opening it).

The DPI-unaware version of Delphi 11 does not affect the placement or sizing of the data module or its components at all, nor does it add the PixlsPerInch property.

3 hours ago, Damon said:

Here's another issue that seems to be only high dpi occuring.

Wow, that's really weird.  I've been using Delphi 11, DPI-Aware for a few months now and have several data modules and forms with non-visual controls and they have never been repositioned.

Do you have any IDE Experts installed?  Is this VCL or Firemonkey? 

LOL! We're all there at one point or another.

Well, they could've limited it to edit only the currently selected theme. That might have been a little less confusing but it would be tedious if you wanted to configure several different themes at once--you'd have edit options for one theme, save, go switch your theme, then go back into the options and configure the next theme. What the "Edit Layout" does is simply take you to the Welcome Page section of the Tools > Options page where you can set a custom background for each theme all before leaving the Options. (And you can get there, of course, without even clicking the "Edit Layout" link from the Welcome Page.) Thinking about it from that perspective makes sense (to me).

To find the original background images, you can click Load... on one of the themes where you haven't yet changed the background theme, then look at the File Name box; the filename of the currently selected background is shown there. On my system, that folder is C:\ProgramData\Embarcadero\BDS\22.0\Background images.

To reiterate what Uwe is saying, let's take an example. I have my theme set to Dark. I go into Options and set a custom background for the Light theme, save twice, and I'm back to the Welcome screen where my dark theme's background is unchanged. But when I switch to the Light theme, there's my new background.

You're saying this does not work for you?

If you have the separate date parts already, I would definitely agree that EncodeDate is better. But if you're parsing a string, hoping it's in a date format, using TryStrToDate can avoid the exception, like @Remy Lebeaumentioned. But perhaps that's for a different use case than you're working with.

On 7/20/2022 at 10:38 PM, Stano said:

They convinced me very quickly not to use Try/StrToDate(). They consider it a reprehensible practice.

Really? Why?

@Rollo62 By the way, this would've been more appropriate as a comment on my blog rather than a question here in this forum. My blog post doesn't have anything to do with Delphi.

6 hours ago, Rollo62 said:

I only wonder why you were not looking after the big 3-5 in Cloud: Google Drive / FirebaseCloudStorage / AWS / Azure / Apple iCloud to the comparison ?

Don't confuse big-business cloud services with the specific functionality I was looking for: file synchronization. However, there are many options out there which I did not evaluate; I'll address the ones you asked about.

I do use Google Drive a little, mainly for automatically saving photos from my Android phone and for working on shared Google Docs files. I've recently moved most of my stuff off of Google because I had my domain tied to G-Suite for business and they recently stopped offering that for free. Firebase is a platform for web and mobile application development and tied to Google, not a general-purpose file-sync service.

I have an AWS account but setting up an S3 bucket and syncing to it is not straight-forward and there are complicated bandwidth and storage cost calculations--I wanted something simple. AWS is also geared more for business applications--which I've used but had not considered it for simple file-sync purposes. Is there a specific service I'm forgetting about that would've fit in with this? Or did you mention AWS just because it's known for cloud services?

I also have an Azure account and use remote virtual machines and services but like AWS, it has complicated bandwidth and storage costs, and it's geared more for business--it's not a simple file-sync service. If I had an on-premises Windows network and used their hybrid cloud, this would work but if that were the case, I wouldn't need a cloud-sync service, I could simply use a network server's file share space. This is another service I think you mentioned simply because when people hear "cloud" they think of AWS and Azure but I was looking specifically for a cloud-based, file-sync service to replace OneDrive, which is Microsoft's product in this space and which works with Azure and Office 365--which is what I was moving away from.

As for Apple, that's a little different story. While I have a few Apple devices for development and testing, I stay away from Apple products and services as much as possible on general principles: I don't like their high prices and restrictive user interfaces. This discussion could easily end up in arguments about Microsoft vs Apple, Android vs iPhone, etc. but I don't want to do that--I'm just saying this was my personal quest and Apple is never on the list of options for me unless there is no other option.

34 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

The idea is you open a project in the IDE, DPM ensures that any libraries that project (or project group) uses will be installed. Not just any version of the libraries - the specific version that the project references

Ah! I see! That would be nice. I have a couple of legacy projects I support in Delphi XE that I have to keep in separate virtual machines because of conflicting components--DPM would solve that. (Oh wait--DPM is for XE2 and above...)

41 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

I just get frustrated when I see or read about yet another way to install a single library

Got it! I'll look to see how Indy can fit in with DPM. 

4 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

Do you use GetIt?

Yes--quite a bit. In fact, I wrote AutoGetIt so I guess I do see a use case for automating the management of packages! But after installing Delphi and the packages, my installation needs are done. I don't completely get the need to be continually installing/uninstalling/upgrading packages all the time--or maybe that's not the real purpose of a package manager. I use a handful of components and there aren't that many changes that often--my time is spent working on projects, not package management so much. This seems like a lot of work to only occasionally save some time.

9 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

Or a package manager on other dev platforms - like nuget for .net, npm for javascript, Gem for ruby, Crate for rust etc.

I've worked a little with .NET and gone through some courses on Javascript so have been exposed to nuget and npm but only used them to follow explicit directions for getting an environment up to speed. My perspective is that there are far more libraries and packages in the .NET and JS world so the need there is obvious.

Do you see DPM eventually being able to take a fresh Delphi install, run DPM with a list of libraries and in a few minutes, have a complete dev environment set up and ready to go? I think that's how I read it. I would like that ability and even explored that idea by installing Delphi with Chocolatey a few years ago, but there are so many different methods of installation, acknowledging copyrights, inserting license keys, etc. (like you point out in your blog), that I dropped it--the task took far more work than it was worth (to me).

Now with Indy, having an automated install/update process could benefit a LOT of people right away--and with it being an open-source project, it's far easier to work with.

I'd be happy to take this discussion off-line and look at DPM further with you.