Dimensional Data

We are used to inspect a call-stack when something goes wrong in our application and it crashes. Delphi has excellent add-on tools that log detailed call-stack information when an application crashes. But it is not always when an application crashes that call-stack information can be useful. We experience ourselves from time to time that having detailed call-stack information during a regular running application could help us trace undesired situations. Recently, it happened that in rare cases, a component property ended up with an unexpected value. In the application where the component was used, it was from many parts of the code and VCL framework itself that this property was set and it was mostly a matter of knowing from where exactly the unexpected value was set. Once we knew, we could understand and address the problem. The ability to just take at runtime a snapshot of the call-stack when a specific value was set was sufficient to find the culprit. So, while this capability saved us already for several cases an enormous amount of time, we thought it was interesting to make it also available to you in TMS MemInsight. While TMS MemInsight will also give you at run-time insight into the call-stack when exceptions occur, now there is a simple method GetCallStack(sl: TStrings) that you can call from anywhere and as many times as you want and it will return detailed call-stack information. Only requirement is that you link your application with a detailed map information (see Linker options under Project options) How it works? Imagine there is a class TMyClass with a property Text:   TMyClass = class(TPersistent)   protected     procedure SetText(const Value: string);   public     property Text: string read FText write SetText;   end; Now, we want to know from where exactly in our application, this class Text property would be set with an empty string value. We can write the property setter in the following way: uses    TMS.MI.Core; interface type   TMyClass = class(TPersistent)   protected     procedure SetText(const Value: string);   public     property Text: string read FText write SetText;   end; implementation proceduer TMyClass.SetText(const Value: string); var   sl: TStringList; begin   FText := Value;   if FText = ” then   begin     sl := TStringList.Create;     try       GetCallStack(sl);       sl.SaveToFile(‘c:tempcallstack.log’);     finally       sl.Free;     end;   end; end; Now, at application level we can use this class for example like:   MyClass.Text := Edit1.Text; and when the text property is being set with an empty string, we’ll get a nice stack-trace report giving us the information we wanted. For this example, we create at TForm class level the method to set the myClass.Text via:   TForm1 = class(TForm)   private     { Private declarations }     procedure SetClassText(s: string);   end; implementation procedure TForm1.SetClassText(s: string); begin myclass.Text := s; end;    and when we call this from both the an edit control’s OnChange event and a form button OnClick event: procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin   SetClassText(Edit1.Text); end; procedure TForm1.Edit1Change(Sender: TObject); begin   SetClassText(Edit1.Text); end; Now, we get a nice stack trace log when the class Text property is set with an empty string value: TMyClass.SetText (57)TForm1.SetClassText (77)TForm1.Button1Click (43)TControl.Click (7443)TWinControl.WndProc (10162)TButtonControl.WndProc (2617)…. […]

TMS VCL UI Pack is our flag-ship VCL product comprising over 600 VCL components to help you create more feature-rich VCL Windows applications faster. Today, we have released TMS VCL UI Pack v10.7.7.0 that is the 8th release so far in this year 2022. We actually lost count on the number of releases since the inception of TMS VCL UI Pack (formerly named TMS Component Pack in 1998). With TMS VCL UI Pack we not only want to enable you to include very powerful features fast in your VCL applications, we also want to deliver fixes, improvements as well as your wishes for new features fast. After all, we are in a fast moving world and software developers want to roll-out updates to their customers also fast. All this inspired by the famous words of Mark Twain: “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection”. So, today, we have released TMS VCL UI Pack 10.7.7.0, release number 8 this year. This is a shortlist of new features & improvements that already went into TMS VCL UI Pack just in 2022: 10.7.7.0 New : VCL styles support added in TAdvMoneyEdit New : Support to persist keyboards with unicode characters in TAdvTouchKeyboard New : Support for use of TVirtualImageList for use in high-DPI scenarios for TDBAdvGlowNavigator New : Support for drawing overlapped events added in TPlannerCalendar TPlannerCalendarGroup New : Setting SelectionColor SelectionTextColor = clNone allows to always use specified custom color in TAdvDBLookupComboBox New : CalculatorLook.BorderColor added in TAdvMoneyEdit New : Binary identifier setting in syntax styler to highlight also binary formatted numbers in TAdvMemo New : AutoShowCalculator property added in TAdvMoneyEdit Improved : cblChrome close button appearance in high DPI in TAdvOfficeTabSet Improved : LabelFont handling in connection with ParentFont in controls with attached label Improved : Alignment preserve when entering new line in TAdvRichEditor  10.7.6.0 New : Visible property to show or hide the extra needles in TAdvSmoothGauge New : VCL Style enabled cell checkbox drawing in TAdvStringGrid New : OnItemClick and OnItemDblClick events in TAdvKanbanBoard New : Added wpSftpList support in TWebCopy New : Added support for use of TVirtualImageList in TPlannerMonthView Improved : Error handling when invalid time was entered in TAdvTimePickerDropDown Improved : Dropdown control sizing in Delphi 11 for high DPI in TAdvControlDropDown Improved : Closed button look in high DPI scenarios in TAdvOfficeTabSet Improved : ButtonWidth handling with high DPI in TAdvEditBtn Improved : Added Key in TAdvSmoothListBoxItem.CopySettings()  10.7.5.0 New : Property FindText added to control whether the node is looked up or not in TAdvTreeComboBox New : BeginUpdate/EndUpdate methods added in TAdvWordCloud Improved : High DPI drawing of sys icons and per monitor DPI handling in TDirectoryListBoxEx TFileListBoxEx Improved : Exposed Font and Align properties for TAdvGradientDirectionSelector  10.7.4.1 Improved : telephone type specifier adding in export in TvCard Improved : Label font size initialization at design-time for high DPI in TAdvSpinEdit TAdvComboBox TAdvDropDown … Improved : Exception handling for opening unsupported files from TAdvRichEditorEditToolBar  10.7.4.0 New : TVirtualImageList support added in TInspectorBar New : TAdvOfficePage.TextAlignmentTAdvOfficePage.TextVerticalAlignment added Improved : THTMLStatusBar high DPI support for Delphi 11 Improved : Stop editing by setting Key = #0 in OnKeyPress() in TAdvStringGrid Improved : RowHeight updating via Zoom() in high DPI / Delphi 11 in TAdvStringGrid Improved : Popup toolbar behavior in high in TAdvRichEditor Improved : Performance in […]

WebAssembly is a low-level language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance. Free Pascal offers, since some time, a way to compile Pascal to WebAssembly and integrate these modules inside your web applications. So, of course we had to experiment with it, to see if it lives up to the hype. It is important to know that, while WebAssembly is fast and very compact, it is very low level. WebAssembly has no direct connection to the browser DOM and communication between JavaScript and WebAssembly is limited to arrays of bytes, integer and float values. Fortunately, you can allocate memory for the WebAssembly module and use this to read/write more complex data. But all the interfacing that is needed for this (and for accessing the DOM) is something that you’ll need to write yourself.  Image Processing For our experiment we’ve created an image processing application as this typically involves heavy data processing. You can watch a live demo of the application here. You can upload an image and use different filters on it. You can use the toggle switch to choose between pure JavaScript or WebAssembly to process the image and see for yourself how much faster WebAssembly is.  The first test only took the processing of the image in account, and not the reading & writing of data. As you can see in the graph, in this test, WebAssembly is about 3 times as fast.  For the second test, we timed the full function. This included writing and reading from WebAssembly. And even then, WebAssembly is about 1.5 times faster than JavaScript.  Conclusion JavaScript is much slower than WebAssembly when processing of large amounts of data is involved. For small tasks, JavaScript might still be the way to go, as the difference is neglectable. For resource-intensive tasks, like video editing and advanced image processing,  WebAssembly is the way to go. These tasks require a lot of computing and that is where WebAssembly shines, performing at near native speed.  Source code You can download the demo project source code here. This includes the TMS WEB Core web client application as well as the source code of the Pascal based image processing to be compiled to a WebAssembly module. We have shipped a pre-compiled WebAssembly file in the project so that you don’t have to compile it yourself. But if you want to compile or write your own WebAssembly modules you’ll need to install the FPC team Object Pascal to WebAssembly compiler. You can find the installation guide for the compiler here.  

So far in this blog series, we’ve covered JS libraries that included Helpers, Tools, and Assets.  This time out, we’re going to dig into the first of many JS libraries that feature some sort of Control – a component or widget or element of some kind that can extend your TMS WEB Core project beyond what the standard components offer.  Our first control describes itself as “a lightweight and powerful datetime picker” and indeed it is!  It’s called FlatPickr and in this first part, we’ll cover how to get it up and running in your TMS WEB Core projects, with a few examples to show off its key features.  In part two, we’ll take a different approach by creating a TFlatPickr component that can then be added to the Delphi IDE Palette, making it even easier to use in your projects. Motivation TMS WEB Core comes with a datetime picker of course, the TWebDateTimePicker component.  And if you’re a fan of FNC components, there are the TTMSFNCDatePicker and TTMSFNCDateTimePicker components. And if you’re hunting around the Delphi IDE Palette, you’ll also run across a jQuery-based component called TWebJQXDateTimeInput. So plenty of options right off the bat.  But it would be hard to think of another class of component where people (like me!) have very strongly-held opinions on how they should look and work, and what kinds of options they absolutely need to have.  And that’s before we even get to the whole epic tale of date and time formats, something we’ll also be covering very shortly when we get to Luxon.  Also, datetime pickers hide away a surprising amount of complexity for something that, on the surface, appears to be very simple.  When it comes to choosing a datetime picker, here are some of the considerations that I have in mind. I would consider these to be “minimum requirements” rather than “nice-to-haves” for my projects. Your projects may have an entirely different set of priorities of course.  What is perhaps most important is that the same datetime picker component is used throughout a project, where possible. Week Numbers.  I work with many clients from the agriculture industry where week numbers are used all the time, probably more often than dates, in fact. Variations.  Sometimes it makes sense to display a full month calendar on the page. Maybe even two months.  Sometimes it is a drop-down.  Sometimes there’s also a time.  Sometimes there’s only a time.  Being able to use the same control in different variations helps with providing a consistent user experience and results in fewer headaches as a developer. Restrictions.  Having a start/end range for selectable dates is important, but it is often necessary to be able to provide a list of available dates to the component, and for the component to make it clear to the user which dates are available to be selected.  Selections.  The flexibility to be able to select an individual date, multiple dates, or a range is important, but making it simple is just as important. Themes.  The component has to fit in visually with the rest of the project.  My projects typically use CSS for theme work, so bonus points if it can be themed easily with CSS. But at the very list it should provide some options for the ubiquitous light and […]