DelphiDabbler's Programming Blog

CodeSnip v4 Preview Now Available

2011-12-31T23:57:00.000Z

By the skin of my teeth I've kept the promise I made in my earlier post to release an alpha, or preview, version of CodeSnip v4 by the end of 2011 - with 20 mins to spare! Phew.The main new feature of the program is that snippets etc. can now be opened in multiple tabs, allowing more than one to be viewed at the same time.There are several other UI changes and a lot of behind that scenes

CodeSnip v4: progress at last

2011-10-24T11:44:00.000+01:00

Back in December 2010 I announced I'd started work on CodeSnip v4 and expected to release a new beta in a "few months". Now, nearly eleven months later I've made some noticable progress and am considering an alpha release! I'm hoping to get this out by the year end.One of first new features I've decided on is to add multiple tab browsing of the database. This means that more than one snippet can

Help with Delphi XE2 program paths please

2011-09-08T14:53:00.001+01:00

I've just updated CodeSnip to v3.9.0 to allow code snippets to be test compiled by Delphi XE2 (32 bit only). But I've had to make some educated guesses in adding that support because I don't yet have XE2. I'm hoping you can help by either confirming or correcting the following assumptions: The registry key \Software\Embarcadero\BDS\9.0 exists in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive. The registry key

Curious bug in CodeSnip???

2011-05-20T00:04:00.000+01:00

A user of my CodeSnip program has reported a strange bug where, after using the Snippets Editor to add a new snippet, the editor dialog box refuses to close, hanging the program. Apparently this happens only sometimes, and affects v3.8.9 and some earlier versions. I can't reproduce the problem and was wandering if anyone else has experienced this bug. If so it would be very helpful if you could

Delphi, Javascript and Floating Point Parameters

2011-05-05T13:26:00.001+01:00

I recently came across an interesting little problem when using Delphi to call JavaScript in an HTML document loaded into a TWebBrowser control. The code used the execScript method of the IHTMLWindow interface, which requires that a string containing the JavaScript function call is passed as one of its parameters. So you have to assemble a string containing the function call and its parameters,

New host for DelphiDabbler (part 2)

2011-04-22T13:48:00.002+01:00

The site on the old server has now been taken down, so if you are getting any "can't find server" errors when accessing www.delphidabbler.com its time to flush your DNS cache. The migration seems to have gone well and I've cleared up what glitches I have found. If you've found an error you can burst my bubble by emailing me about the problem on teething [at] delphidabbler [dot] com

New New Wiki Wiki

2011-04-12T08:54:00.001+01:00

Forgot to mention before, but there's now a wiki at wiki.delphidabbler.com. It's currently being used for a series of FAQs about some of my Delphi Library components and units. The hope is that others may add to it. You can also leave new questions there. At present there are FAQs for: About Box Component Console Application Runner Classes Drop Files Components Message Dialog Components I

New host for DelphiDabbler

2011-04-11T22:26:00.002+01:00

As of today DelphiDabbler.com has moved to a new web host. The nameservers have been updated and the relocated site should start to appear over the next couple of days. Why the move?. Down to money really. This is a non commercial site with falling advertising revenue (albeit with increasing traffic!) and my old web host hiked the price while admittedly providing a host of new features.

RIP DelphiDabbler Mailing Lists

2010-12-16T17:28:00.004Z

If you have been a subscriber to my mailing lists you may have noticed that there have been no mailings since about June 2010. That's because I've decided to stop producing newsletters. The reason? I'm afraid I just don't have the time. There are more efficient and much more timely ways of getting site news out there via news feeds and through my Twitter account. Here are the RSS feed links:

CodeSnip v4

2010-12-06T11:54:00.000Z

I've started development of version 4 of CodeSnip, the Delphi source code snippets editor and viewer. I am inviting suggestions for new features. If you have any ideas please use the project's Feature Tracker on SourceForge. If you prefer to discuss your ideas then please leave a comment to this posting. There's a new branch of CodeSnip's Subversion repository that contains the v4 development

Concatenating Dynamic Arrays

2010-11-05T00:44:00.000Z

Another day another unit test and another extension to my little TArrayEx class. This time I found myself having to concatenate some dynamic arrays. After solving the problem for the particular array type I decided to produce a generic solution. Here's the method I came up with: type TArrayEx = class(TObject) public ...

DelphiDabbler Code Library help

2010-09-11T13:49:00.000+01:00

Some users of the components and units from the DelphiDabbler Code Library have contacted me to ask if the library's help is available in HTML help format because WinHelp format I used for the library won't work by default on Windows Vista and later. The answer is no - and I don't have time to do the conversions. However, all is not lost because there is now a Wiki for each of the Code Library

Initialising dynamic arrays - take 2

2010-09-11T13:15:00.000+01:00

In my earlier post on this subject I presented some methods to use to initialise and clone dynamic arrays. Some comments to that post suggested a simpler approach using compiler features I didn't know existed. In this post I've simply collected the information from those comments together in one place. To initialise an array from literal values you can use the special array constructor provided

Deleting elements from a dynamic array

2010-06-24T22:27:00.000+01:00

In my blog "Initialising Dynamic Arrays" I mentioned I have been writing some unit tests that needed numerous repetative array initialisation operations. Well, one of the other common operations I found myself writing was the deletion of items from dynamic arrays. So I decided to find a generic way of doing this. Assuming we know the index of the item to be deleted we need the equivalent of

Initialising dynamic arrays

2010-06-23T02:46:00.001+01:00

When writing some unit tests a while ago I found myself needing to initialise some dynamic arrays with test data. It would be nice if we could do something like this: var A: array of Integer; begin A := (1,2,3,4); // !! WRONG end; but we can't. So I decided to write some functions to initialise dynamic arrays to the contents of another array, be it a constant, a literal or another

Being dim #2: No generic global procedures

2010-06-22T14:29:00.001+01:00

The other day I was writing some unit tests and needed some helper functions to look up some array elements of in arrays of different base types. I had several overloaded functions to do the job, like this: function IndexOf(const Item: string; const A: array of string): Integer; overload; function IndexOf(const Item: Integer; const A: array of Integer): Integer; overload; Oh, I thought,

Being dim #1: Array and set enumerators

2010-06-22T11:28:00.001+01:00

One of my favourite additions to Delphi over the past years has been the for..in construct and the associated enumerators. I just love the way we can do var Ch: Char; S: string; begin S := 'Some text'; for Ch in S do // Do something with Ch end; So how come I missed that enumerators work on sets and arrays? I'm mentioning this here just in case it's slipped past anyone else, and

Top Secret Code Snippets Test Code

2010-05-27T22:14:00.000+01:00

For about three months now I've had some code that tests and exercises some of the snippets in the Code Snippets Database. But, if you don't get the Code Snippets newsletter, you won't know about it because I forgot to tell anyone else! Anyhow, the code is stored in my Delphi Doodlings Subversion repository on Assembla in the CodeSnippets sub-directory of the trunk. There are currently three

Decoding Base 64 encoded data

2010-05-27T15:54:00.000+01:00

A while ago someone asked me how to go about decoding Base 64 encoded code in a single routine. Here's what I came up with. It uses the Indy internet component suite to do the grunt work and simply wraps the various Indy calls into a function. uses Classes, IdCoderMIME ... function Base64Decode(const EncodedText: string):

Delphi Tips Editor Virus???

2010-05-09T13:13:00.000+01:00

There have been a few reports of a possible virus in the third party Delphi Tips Editor published on DelphiDabbler.com. Just to let everyone know that this is likely (but not guaranteed) to have been a false positive due to the exe compressor used by the author. However, to be on the safe side the offending code has been replaced by a recompiled version that passes all the tests at http://

Singletons

2010-04-05T01:09:00.003+01:00

For a long time now I've been looking for a nice singleton implementation that meets my needs. I want a singleton that: Can't be created more than once. Can't be freed until the program terminates. Can be used as a common base class for all the program's singletons. There are plenty of implementations around that meet requirements 1 and 2, but most of those can't be overridden (usually

CodeSnip problems, problems, problems

2010-03-25T11:16:00.005Z

Arrgh! I've been having a lot of problems with the CodeSnip program's database update code - it's been working for some and not for others. All this has happened since I converted the program to Unicode and compiled with Delphi 2010. I'm posting this for two reasons: To try to explain to long suffering users what has been going on with program lately - it's not usually this flaky. To forewarn

Delphi Tips News

2010-03-16T02:51:00.000Z

There's now another new RSS feed that provides news of changes to the Delphi Tips section of DelphiDabbler.com. Subscribe.

URL Decoding revisited

2010-03-14T11:58:00.002Z

Time to complete the set. So far in this series I have presented URIEncode, URIDecode and URIEncodeQueryString. So here's the missing piece of the jigsaw: URIDecodeQueryString. This routine decodes a query string that has been "query-string-encoded". If you look at URL Encoding revisited you'll see that a query string is encoded with normal URI encoding, except that space characters are encoded

URL Decoding

2010-03-10T13:00:00.005Z

To complement the code of my URL Encoding post, I've now developed a URIDecode routine. It attempts to decode URIs that were percent-encoded according to RFC 3986. It also allows for some malformed percent-encoded URIs, i.e. those that contain characters outside the RFC's "unreserved" character set. Here's the code. An explanation follows.