Adam’s February 2018 Meeting Summary

Twas a cold, wet day in London town, and most of the sessions for the day concerned Dates, Times and Calendars, with a few digressions.

Peter demonstrated the new TFDBatchMoveDatasetReader / Writer components (new in 10.2.2) which allow really clean conversion of a server side dataset into JSON. This is a powerful addition for programmers wanting to surface data hosted on the cloud to be accessed by any platform that can read JSON.

Peter also discussed the DevArt MySQL component for reading MySQL databases if you do not have Delphi Enterprise.
And he showed the SimDesign DTP component which allows complex designed documents with images and layout to be embedded in Delphi.
It was mentioned that the producer of SimDesign products “isn’t very well”, so the state of development of the components is unknown.

I presented “How I build my own calendar component”, to a lot of scratching of heads and questions like “why would you ever do that?” My Calendar component is built on the TMS diagram component, which was also demoed.

Peter then presented the features of the DevEx Scheduler, a vast calendar component with built in support for a full range of Outlook-like features, and built in Datastore component which allows “no code” implementation of data-connection.

Jason then showed a complex implementation of line-of-business logic for a database application that schedules tasks for an organisation. He particularly reviewed how his system manages Recurrence, i.e. tasks that occur Monthly, Weekly etc.
Jason uses a tiny part of the TMS Planner / Calendar component suite for this purpose, a form which gives users options for types of recurrence and generates a “RecurString” that can be used to manage the recurring task.

Martin then presented the many, varied date / time and calendar representations in his CampMan application. Originally written in Delphi 1. Prior to the existence of new-fangled things like “components”, Martin used a plain old TCanvas and draws elements on it to build up a calendar grid from scratch, and the product still works today.

Finally Martin spent 10 minutes showing a new “Display Board” application he is reading. Using FastReport on a server to generate EMF Files containing tabular lists of events (a bit like an airport departure board), and pulling the EMF file from the server onto a low-cost “Windows Plug-in PC”. This set up allows a customer to display “What’s On” information around their facility quickly and cheaply.

It was suggested that extending the “Display Board” application might be a good basis for a “Code Huddle” day, in which a number of code-groups could try to generate a working system similar to Martin’s work.

Further information and links for all the talks are available in the Members Group