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My guess was on some tricky Windows messages, but DDE is a valid option as well. As I have no source for BDSLauncher I can not say. I took a peek at @dummzeuch's dzBdsLauncher but that also is executing a direct bds.exe call, probably resulting in a new IDE. Finding the method and replicating it would be the goal of this topic.

I do believe that's more than enough, please try not to steer the conversation away. Can we get back to the topic, please?

No, it does not 🙂 First, CurrentKey has a zero value after .OpenKeyReadOnly. Second, you are assigning a wrong registry path, not what the API expects: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shellapi/ns-shellapi-shellexecuteinfoa hkeyClass Type: HKEY A handle to the registry key for the file type. The access rights for this registry key should be set to KEY_READ. This member is ignored if fMask does not include SEE_MASK_CLASSKEY. Edit: wrong parameter copied

That is really surprising as that's not how you open a registry key with TRegistry AND even if you correct that, reg.CurrentKey won't be changed after a single .OpenReadOnly. Running the code on a PC with Delphi 10.4 and 11 installed also confirms failure: it opens up the file in Delphi 10.4.

Tried. Bds.exe never starts, bdslauncher.exe never quits, just hangs. No windows, no errors, nothing. Also tried adding the necessary (?) -pDelphi switch, same result. Tried giving these parameters only to Bdslauncher and only the source file. No effect.

This is exactly what I did. This introduces the new instance issue, which this topic is about. I'm probably missing a parameter - I just don't know which.

Please read the question again. To be able to launch with a specific Delphi version you need to start bds.exe, not just the .pas file; this is how it was until now.

Var TokenHandle: THandle; Begin If LogonUser(PChar(UserEdit.Text), PChar(DomainEdit.Text), PChar(PasswordEdit.Text), LOGON32_LOGON_NETWORK, LOGON32_PROVIDER_DEFAULT, TokenHandle) Then Try // Credentials are valid... // In case needed: If ImpersonateLoggedOnUser(TokenHandle) Then Try // Do stuff in the context of user Finally RevertToSelf; End; Finally CloseHandle(TokenHandle); End; End; User must have network login right to the PC, though.

The benefit is, that you are not actually storing and handling data in a visual component, e.g.: TTreeNode.Data := TMyClass.Create; While it does work it's considered bad practice as you are not separating UI and data / business logic. Anyway, let's not hijack the topic, shall we. OP might not be interested in this discussion.

If you mean https://github.com/pglowack/DelphiJSONComponents/blob/master/JSONTreeView.pas this only visualizes the JSON as far as I can see from the code. You still have to manually append your extra data to each node, or search in each node's children to find your OnClik, URL and Description nodes. I did, and first I used .Data to actually store data too, it was just too convenient. Lately I'm keeping my data in a separate store and .Data only points to the data in this store, if needed. This way I don't even need to free up memory when a node is deleted.

We had a custom component which was only a wrapper for a TStringList, you can do something like this. On the other hand I feel like we are wasting memory; to store textual data you simply can use string constants or if you don't want to convert your TXT files into Delphi strings, build a .res file from them and embed it to the compiled application. In case you wish to convert, I have a method which seemed to work in simple cases and properly splits the input into 255-length chunks while preserving line breaks and escapes apostrophes: Function ToDelphiString(Const inString: String): String; Const ADDITION = #39' + '#39; BREAKAT = 80; Var line, a, max: Integer; sb: TStringBuilder; strarr: TArray<String>; Begin sb := TStringBuilder.Create; Try sb.Append(#39); strarr := AdjustLineBreaks(inString).Split([sLineBreak]); For line := Low(strarr) To High(strarr) Do Begin max := strarr[line].Length Div BREAKAT; For a := 0 To max Do Begin sb.Append(strarr[line].Substring(a * BREAKAT, BREAKAT).Replace(#39, #39#39)); sb.Append(#39); If a <> max Then sb.Append(' +' + sLineBreak + #39); End; If line <> High(strarr) Then sb.Append(' + sLineBreak +' + sLineBreak + #39); End; Result := sb.ToString; Finally FreeAndNil(sb); End; End;

TTreeView is basically a wrapper for the old Windows TreeView component, which was created way before JSON. You MIGHT have some success finding JSON export in TVirtualTreeView but I wouldn't be so sure; most probably you'll have to extract that by yourself. As @haentschman mentioned storing data in a visual component is a bad practice. What I'd do is... Have a TJSONObject which stores your node information. By adding childnodes, you will already have the parent / children relationship and since each JSON object has a name, they only now have to store URL, OnClick javascript handler and description. For quick access to this information when building your TreeList based on the TJSONObject, you can assign the related object to the TTreeNode's .Data pointer. This way you didn't just separate UI / data, but simply can call TJSonObject(TreeView.Selected.Data).ToString to immediately get the selected node's JSON representation. To save the whole tree, call your main TJSONObject.ToString, to rebuild it TJSONObject(TJSONObject.ParseJSONValue). This is by using the Delphi provided System.JSON unit, but you can use any other library you prefer. The idea behind can stay the same.

Glad you found the culprit, detecting rare conditions can be a pain in the back! Stack traces is a must tbh. MadExcept can be used for free, but with limitations; make sure you read the EULA. DebugEngine is a standalone (and completely free) alternative to MadExcept, also @Fr0sT.Brutal maintains a much more lightweight solution called IceDebug if I'm not mistaken.

Hello, I am in the process of verifying if we can update our environment to use Delphi 11.2 instead of the current 10.4.2. However compilation was successful, even the very basic tests failed because of an incorrect date format detected by Delphi. Reproduction is really easy, just execute a single line: TFormatSettings.Create(1038); Result on Delphi 11.2: On 10.4.2: So 11.2 correctly detects the date separator as "." in the locale, however the very next line will call this method, which will replace all separators with a forward slash instead: procedure FixDateSeparator(var DateFormat: string); var P: PChar; InsideLiteral: Boolean; begin InsideLiteral := False; P := PChar(DateFormat); if P = nil then Exit; while P^ <> #0 do begin if P^ = '''' then InsideLiteral := not InsideLiteral; if (P^ = Separator) and (not InsideLiteral) then P^ := '/'; Inc(P); end; end; So because 10.4.2 could not detect the separator, it returns the correct date format. 11.2 detects the separator, ruining the date format instead. The WinAPi definition is the same, buffer is different in the implementation: function GetLocaleInfo; external kernel32 name 'GetLocaleInfoW'; // Delphi 10.4.2 MSWindows implementation function GetLocaleChar(Locale, LocaleType: Integer; Default: Char): Char; var Buffer: array[0..1] of Char; begin if GetLocaleInfo(Locale, LocaleType, Buffer, 2) > 0 then Result := Buffer[0] else Result := Default; end; // Delphi 11.2 MSWindows implementation function GetLocaleChar(Locale, LocaleType: Integer; Default: Char): Char; var Buffer: array[0..2] of Char; begin if GetLocaleInfo(Locale, LocaleType, Buffer, 3) > 0 then Result := Buffer[0] else Result := Default; end; I can not wrap my head around this. I believe it should be a faulty FixDateSeparator implementation, as it makes no sense to change the correct separators to incorrect ones based on the selected locale. Is this an issue in Delphi and I should raise a ticket or maybe I'm missing something...?

If you can detect a malformed packet, you simply can log the input and the output. Once the issue is detected, dump these in a local file so the customer can send it to you. Then, it's a matter of running the same byte sequence against your "processor" to see what / why it happens. You also can do the same if you can't detect the failure, but in this case dumping has to be initiated by a user input. In unexplainable situations I find it helpful to divide my classes up even further. Have a class ONLY for the COM handling, outputting TBytes. Have one converting these to AnsiSting-based "packets". Have an other one to process these. Usually during coding these tiny classes I'm fixing the issue I had in the beginning.

When I was hired this was the first thing I removed from our legacy application. This command only pushes most of the applications data in memory to the swap file, drastically slowing down your application when it tries to access those. It won't decrease your applications memory usage, only relocates it to the hard disk. Avoid it, it does more harm than good. Btw, at us it was in a Timer's OnTimer event, ran once about every minute... As for the memory usage, use a tool like DeLeaker. Put a breakpoint in your loop and make a snapshot each time. When you compare those snapshots, you'll see the objects in memory and the callstack which created said objects. It'll point you in the generic direction of what you should .Close or .Free, WITH THAT SAID Using Task manager to monitor your application usage is vaguely incorrect. It includes memory areas what your code already released but the OS did not take back yet due to memory allocation speed optimization as far as I know.

It returns a dot, a space and #0 (which makes sense) and DevExpress's date editor started to misbehave... normally it showed correct format but when you clicked in it it showed "____ / " and accepted years only. Spent my last day trying to understand how this works and why some hacks were needed at some places. And I think I finally understood. The issue is NOT with Delphi 11.2 but some random unit changing some properties in the global FormatSettings variable (probably as an attempt to fix the wrongly detected separator). Once I found and got rid of that, VCL controls started to work but some (previously fine) calls to StrToDate started to throw exceptions. The reason is, Emba reworked the logic of date and time parsing, which is more strict in the later. While having a short date format of "yyyy. mm. dd." could parse "2022.11.30" in 10.4.2, Delphi 11.2 actually requires the final separator. Loads of experiments and this knowledge resulted a custom DateUtils unit to attempt to unify the behavior if the application is compiled with 10.4.2 and 11.2, I'll still have to roll back some local fixes tomorrow and start to use the helper instead... after that we'll see if my idea works.

I don't know if I follow you here. Does it mean that I must never use FormatSettings.ShortDateFormat as it is, only FormatSettings.ShortDateFormat.Replace('/', FormatSettings.DateSeparator)? The reason I'm asking is that 3rd-party controls (like DevExpress) started to show (and save) dates differently just because of compiling under D11. That makes me think that either the above statement is incorrect, or all 3rd-party controls handle this incorrectly. To correct this I had to manually correct FormatSettings.ShortDateFormat but that immediately breaks all logic which relies on TFormatSettings.Create and StrToDate - which our tool is using a lot. The reason Delphi 10.4.2 could not get it is because Embarcadero didn't provide a buffer big enough. As both versions are calling the same WinApi function, changing the buffer to array[0..1] retrieving will fail on D11 aswell; calling RaiseLastOSError will reveal the reason: Maybe I should have been more precise. I personally don't care about the date separator alone, only the malformation of ShortDateFormat because of it, which seem to affect appearance and logic.

MyFileSourceSize := MyFileStreamSource.Size; Is unnecessary, MyFileSourceSize.Size - MyFileSourceSize.Position will always return the unprocessed bytes. MyFileStreamSource.Read(MyBuffer[0], MyBufferSize); // read and put on the next position... Make sure you also check if .Read returns MyBufferSize. Otherwise you will have "rouge" data what you will write back to the destination, effectively corrupting the output. Also, the pseudocode above won't handle data, which is interrupted by the end of a buffer.

a 32 bit process can allocate a total of 2 GBs of RAM (or 3 if it's large address aware). Loading 3 GBs of data in the memory would use that up by itself, leaving no room for anything else (like the TMemoryStream class or any other variables). So it is expected. As @PeterBelow advised, build a 64 bit executable, or use FileStreams instead of loading everything in the memory.

As a general rule of thumb, never call Application.ProcessMessages by yourself. Let your thread "ping" back with updates from time to time with TThread.Synchronize, you can even have a TTimer in your VCL thread to poll updates from the Thread via public properties. Just make sure you are using some king of locking (TCriticalSection, TMonitor, mutexes, events, etc.) when reading from and writing to these variables.

ccy's version works properly on ZIP archives with LZMA compression. 7-zip is using LZMA2 by default, for which I did not see a pure pascal implementation yet.

Hello, I recently started to experiment with Delphi's TRichEdit control. There is one thing left which I don't know if I'm doing it right; and that's to 'repaint' the document to follow VCL styles. RTF seems to include the generic text color, which is dark if the document was exported with a light / Windows style. If you load the same document back to a RichEdit, which has a dark style active the text will be unreadable. The solution was rather easy: ro := RichEdit.ReadOnly; Try RichEdit.ReadOnly := False; RichEdit.Lines.LoadFromStream(myStream); RichEdit.DefAttributes.Color := TStyleManager.ActiveStyle.GetStyleFontColor(sfEditBoxTextNormal); RichEdit.Modified := False; Finally RichEdit.ReadOnly := ro; End; First, I need to make the RichEdit non-read only, otherwise pictures won't show up in the loaded document. Then, load the stream and change the default color according to the current style. Then simply reset the Modified to false and ReadOnly to the original value. This all seems to work but with this, even hyperlinks are recolored to the default color. They retain their link attributes and formatting, only the color is lost. Is this a normal phenomenon? Should I parse the whole document and recolor all links from code? Or I'm simply loading / saving the document the wrong way? I appreciate all tips 🙂 Thanks!

I discovered a trick. If you put SelStart before a link and set SelLength to 1, RichEdit will select the FULL link text... like The good news in this is that we can optimize the checking cycle to use this feature: Self.SelStart := Integer.MaxValue; max := Self.SelStart; a := 0; While a < max Do Begin Self.SelStart := a; Self.SelLength := 1; If Self.SelAttributes.Color = clWindowtext Then Self.SelAttributes.Color := TStyleManager.ActiveStyle.GetStyleFontColor(sfEditBoxTextNormal); a := Self.SelStart + Self.SelLength; End; Instead of 3000+ msec, the cycle now finishes in 500! Still not ideal, but a lot more bearable 🙂