Dimensional Data

A new week and a new milestone with the TMS team. We have released today a major update for TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code.The big new feature in this new release is that from now on, there is support for frames in TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code. This not only brings the compatibility between TMS WEB Core for Delphi & TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code to a higher level, but of course brings the advantages of using frames to your web client development experience on TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code running on Windows, macOS and Linux. Frames support With frames, you can significantly enhance your productivity for creating web client applications. Frames not only reduce repeating the same form logic within a project but can also be shared among different projects. Our chief architect for TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code José Leon Serna explains how you can work with frames from TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code in detail in this video: Framework improvements Other than frames support, the TMS WEB Core framework also got numerous new features andimprovements. The list is long, we cover in this blog only the major new features: New: Support for annotations & chart area optionsn in TWebGoogleChart New: ColAlignments[] public property for TWebStringGrid and TWebDBGrid New: GetSize() function and OnProgress() event added in TWebHttpRequest New: TStopWatch class in WEBLib.Diagnostics unit added New: Hints for menu items in TWebMainMenu, TWebPopupMenu New: Properties to set Title, Text, URL at design-time for TWebShare New: More design-time customizations for TWebFileUpload like ShowPicture, FontHoverColor, DragColor Improved: Enhanced Bootstrap 5 compatibility Lots of smaller improvements & fixes Get started TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code brings a fresh touch to the experience of developing Object Pascal based web client applications with RAD component-based methodology. It adds to that a WYSIWYG web technology-based form designer, can run directly on the operating system of your choice (Windows, macOS or Linux) and it is the IDE of choice for web developers withan abundance of other useful IDE extensions targeted to make the web client development experience as pleasant as possible.Get Visual Studio Code for free from and install the TMS WEB Core for Visual Studio Code extension today and explore this wonderful new world. What’s next Several exciting new features are meanwhile also well advanced in the pipeline. Expect shortly the release v1.9 with support for inherited forms, Bootstrap project template and Miletus targeting macOS ARM CPUs as well as Raspberry Pi among the highlights. So, stay tuned!

Intro On top of high DPI support at run-time, RAD Studio 11 Alexandria adds support for high DPI at design-time. This means applications/components will need to be modified to live up to this new requirement. This is a tedious job, but nevertheless, one that can be made easier when picking the right tools and libraries. High DPI has been around for quite some time now, impacting the way controls are designed. An important aspect when designing controls is image resources. Typically 16×16 or 24×24 PNG resources are used for non high DPI applications, when running your application on a high DPI screen however (for example at 150%), those sizes are too small. We would need to make sure that each resolution has its image resources available and also dynamically switches between those resources when the scale changes. To take away the need for adding multiple image resources for every possible scale, we designed and integrated SVG into our products and automatically made it available to you.  What is SVG? SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML based graphic format completely built up from vectors. This basically means that an SVG file can be used without quality loss. Coming back to our requirements for high DPI, SVG fits in really nicely. No more numerous image resources for different screen resolutions. Designing various elements of your application based on SVG drastically reduces the time you need to make sure your application looks and feels nice on all various screen resolutions.  SVG also allows you to maintain only one resource. If your application is using one resource for multiple elements, for various sizes, changing only that single resource is sufficient to update your application, not having to worry about the behaviour and look and feel of that resource in all those different situations. In practice SVG support is available when installing one of the following 2 products. After starting the IDE, SVG is already available. This is not only registered for our products, but also available in default VCL controls. We start by adding VCL.TMSFNCTypes or AdvTypes unit (depending on the installed product). The unit will register the SVG type at runtime. At designtime, the package already registers SVG support. For this sample, we take 2 TButtons, one with a PNG and one with an SVG image resource. We drop a TVirtualImageList and a TTMSFNCSVGImageCollection on the form. The TTMSFNCSVGImageCollection can be used to add both image resources. After feeding the TTMSFNCSVGImageCollection to the TVirtualImageList, we are ready to connect our buttons. After connecting everything together, filling up the TVirtualImageList, the buttons look similar, because the resolution of the PNG is 24×24 and no scaling is applied.  TVirtualImageList has the option to scale images, so when we change the resolution from 28×28 to 128×128 making our buttons larger, we see the quality of the PNG is no longer good. The resolution of the SVG however, nicely scales to the new requested size. For PNG, this means we would need to create a TVirtualImageList for different resolutions, managing each list, detecting which scale is applied and applying the correct TVirtualImageList. While the SVG stays nice and sharp, and only one TVirtualImageList is required independent of the initial resolution, or the resolution of the screen. Additionally, using SVGs also immediately provides a clean and […]

We’re pleased and proud that after numerous months of hard work, we have reached the milestone of the first TMS FNC WX Pack release! A brand new product TMS FNC WX Pack is a brand new product in the FNC family, that is the family of our universal components or in other words, components you can choose to use in VCL applications, FireMonkey cross-platform applications, LCL Lazarus applications or TMS WEB Core based web, PWA and cross platform desktop applications. TMS FNC WX Pack is available as standalone product and as expected, it is also part of TMS ALL-ACCESS and TMS FNC Component Studio. What is WX Pack? With TMS FNC WX Pack, you can leverage existing web libraries in VCL Windows applications, FMX cross-platform applications for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android & Linux, or TMS WEB Core Web applications for any device running a modern browser. The integration is seamless and in almost all cases the functionality is offline usable as components from your Delphi or C++Builder applications. No extra files need to be deployed along with your applications, the components are designed in such a way they look, feel, behave just like other framework components. What components are included? At this moment there are following components included: TTMSFNCWXBarCode Bar code generating component with close to hundred bar code types and extensive customization TTMSFNCWXQRCode QR code generating component with several settings  TTMSFNCWXGHTMLMemo Editor component to edit HTML formatted text, including support for tables, hyperlinks, images, styles, undo/redo, … TTMSFNCWXCamera Access your device cameras and take pictures or record videos TTMSFNCWXPDFViewer Add the capability to render PDF files in your application, page by page and with optional thumbnails TTMSFNCWXVideoPlayer Play videos from local files or from URLs directly in your application TTMSFNCWXJSONFormatter Show JSON data in pretty format in your application TTMSFNCWXSpeechSynthesis Have text spoken with different voices directly from your app. TTMSFNCWXOCR Add an OCR engine to your Object Pascal app. Feed the OCR engine with an image with text and have the text extracted. Includes support for different languages. Returns in the result an accuracy score for the OCR process. Read our first announcement blog for more detailed information but here in this blog we also have two new videos showing and explaining several components in the TMS FNC WX Pack: Curious? If you are curious to see what is possible and how without immediately heading over to the fully functional trial download and experiment with the components, you can also follow our webinar we gave on TMS Web Academy: What’s next This release is only the first small step in this new direction. This new technique offers unseen capabilities to bring non-trivial functionality and new technology to Delphi developers. Several more such functionality that is not readily available at this moment for Delphi developers is on the radar to bring to Delphi developers. So, expect our team to bring new components over the coming months in this category. Our team is also listening to your suggestions and ideas for other functionality to leverage this way and in addition, we will bring more detailed information how you can use the FNC bridging technology yourself to wrap & expose existing web libraries as components in your Delphi apps.

TMS FNC Maps v2.2 now includes a new free geocoding service in addition to the existing supported geocoding services from Azure, Bing, Google, Here and MapBox. OpenStreetMap Nominatim The OpenStreetMap Nominatim API service provides geocoding and reverse geocoding free of charge and does not require an API key. This service can be used in combination with all supported mapping services in TMS FNC Maps. Specifically in combination with the OpenLayers mapping service this is a worthwhile free alternative to comparable paying services. Geocoding A geocoding request converts a text address to a latitude & longitude coordinate. The coordinate can then be used to display a location on the map. With the following code we are going to look up the location of “Baker Street, London” and display it on the center of the map with a marker and a title that contains the address.Note that this example uses the asynchronous method with a callback. procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var Item: TTMSFNCGeocodingItem; begin TMSFNCGeocoding1.Service := gsOpenStreetMap; TMSFNCGeocoding1.GetGeocoding(‘Baker Street, London’, procedure(const ARequest: TTMSFNCGeocodingRequest; const ARequestResult: TTMSFNCCloudBaseRequestResult) begin if (ARequestResult.Success) and (ARequest.Items.Count > 0) then begin Item := ARequest.Items[0]; TMSFNCMaps1.BeginUpdate; TMSFNCMaps1.SetCenterCoordinate(Item.Coordinate.ToRec); TMSFNCMaps1.AddMarker(Item.Coordinate.ToRec, Item.Address); TMSFNCMaps1.EndUpdate; end; end ); end; Reverse Geocoding A reverse geocoding request converts a latitude & longitude coordinate to a text address. The text address can then be used to display an address associated with a location on the map. With the following code we are going to track a click on the map, retrieve the address for that location and display it on the map with a marker and a title that contains the address Note that this example uses the synchronous method that provides an immediate result without a callback. procedure TForm1.TMSFNCMaps1MapClick(Sender: TObject; AEventData: TTMSFNCMapsEventData); var Address: string; begin TMSFNCGeocoding1.Service := gsOpenStreetMap; Address := TMSFNCGeocoding1.GetReverseGeocodingSync(AEventData.Coordinate.ToRec); TMSFNCMaps1.BeginUpdate; TMSFNCMaps1.SetCenterCoordinate(AEventData.Coordinate.ToRec); TMSFNCMaps1.AddMarker(AEventData.Coordinate.ToRec, Address); TMSFNCMaps1.EndUpdate; end; Available Now The TMS FNC Maps v2.2 update is available now for Delphi & Visual Studio Code (with TMS WEB Core). You can download the latest version and start using the new features right away!

TMS Aurelius 5.6 has been released, and the major feature is a brand new, full-feature dictionary. Aurelius dictionary is intended to be used in Aurelius queries. The idea is that instead of using strings to reference entity properties, you use the dictionary properties directly. For example, a usual Aurelius query is like this: Results := Manager.Find   .Where(Linq[‘Name’].Like(‘M%’))   .List; But the above approach is error prone, the ‘Name’ string can be wrong, it can be wrongly typed, or the name might be modified. You will only find the errors at runtime. With the dictionary, you can write the query like this: Results := Manager.Find   .Where(Dic.Customer.Name.Like(‘M%’))   .List; You can also reference associated objects, for example, querying all invoices where the country of the customer of the invoice is from Brazil:   Manager.Find     .Select(Dic.Invoice.Total.Sum)     .Where(Dic.Invoice.Customer.Country.Name = ‘Brazil’) It’s a simple thing that makes a huge difference when you are using it daily. You have code completion, you have compile-time check, you minimize the errors at runtime. In summary, it increases your productivity a lot. TDictionaryGenerator.GenerateFile(‘C:SomeFolderMyDictionary.pas’); Or from command-line using the AureliusDictionaryGenerator.exe tool, which generates it from a BPL package: AureliusDictionaryGenerator.exe -i:Default -p:”C:MyProjectBplEntities” “C:MyProjectMyDictionary.pas” Last but not least, the dictionary can be validated at runtime! This way, if somehow the dictionary and the real classes do not match (for example, you might modify your classes and forget to generate the dictionary again), the dictionary will tell you the differences: TDictionaryValidator.Check(Dic); It’s as simple as that. This way you make sure you don’t have surprises at runtime and your dictionary is correct! This is an awesome new feature that brings a night-and-day difference when writing Aurelius queries. If you want to have more detailed information, of course please refer to the documentation where all the above features are explained in details. Wagner R. Landgraf