Seven Years of Improvements - Sun, 12 Jul 2015

I know my last two posts were not written in English for the normal person. But I felt I had to document a bit of the work involved in just upgrading a development environment. It is complex process full of pits and valleys. Getting through it needs a machete and a torch. We programmers struggle with our programming tools as much as our users struggle with the programs we create.

Now it is time to reap the rewards. Delphi and TRichView and ElPack and EurekaLog each have gone through seven years of improvements. I can run through the change logs of each version, and see what changes are notable and will provide benefits to Behold users.

Delphi improvements

Lots has been added since Delphi 2009.

The most important improvement for the future of Behold is FireDAC with SQLite support. I will be using this for Behold’s database.

Another improvement is 64-bit capability. Now I will be able to make Behold available both as a 32-bit program and as a 64-bit program.

There are new online data access protocols now available including REST web services, and libraries I may be needing. The newer versions of Delphi include improved JSON low level processing and an improved XML engine.

There were supposedly style improvements that take on the Theme of the O/S (Vista, Windows 7, WIndows 8), etc., but other than it adding a blue background to indicate that a toolbar item was selected, I haven’t noticed too much difference. It’s also touch-enabled. XE8 added support for Windows 10 and Windows 10 styles, so it will be ready when that comes.

Delphi has really enhanced its Generics library, which is a suite of data structures I can use in Behold. They are well-written, generalized and fast. They should speed my coding time, and over time I’ll replace my older data structures with these. Delphi 2009 included an early version of Generics, but there were some bugs so I only made limited use of them.

A Parallel Computing library has been added that will allow me to optimize Behold with background processes and to keep it running as fast as possible.

They also made lots of fixes and improvement. One item that really pleased me was a fix that helped Behold’s Find box. When you bring it up, it stays on your screen, but it is called a non-modal box because it does not take control of your screen. So you can find something and then go to the Everything Report and work on it, and then go back to the Find box. The default action in the Find box is of course to find the text. In Behold 1.1 and earlier, going back and forth between the Find Box and the main program would somehow lose the default action. I would press Ctrl-F to go back to the Find box and then press enter to get the next search, but it wouldn’t work. I tried in the past to find an easy fix to this, but it was a Delphi/Operating System thing. What pleased me is apparently, whatever was causing this loss of the default was fixed sometime between Delphi 2009 and XE8. Hopefully more subtle bugs like this were also fixed by going to XE8, without many new ones creeping in.

RichView improvements

The Everything Report is built on RichView, so any new features and improvements to RichView can benefit Behold.

I was using RichView 10.1.4 from 2008 and have now installed version 15.7.

Now it can export as a word document (.docx files). I’ve added DocX as an export option in Behold and it will be available in the next release.

Some fixes/improvements include improved rendering of bidirected text, optimizations in calculating text width (which is probably the main reason why Behold loads 30% faster when compiiled with Delphi XE8 and RichView 15.7), touch screen support, e.g. handles when selecting with a touchscreen:

Also improvement to the line breaking algorithm, 64-bit compilation support, style templates (which I may or may not use). Hidden items were added, but I already had my own customized implementation of hidden items which I liked better, so I kept my own.

ElPack improvements

I use ElPack in Behold for the TreeView, the grids in the Organize pages, and a few other components. I had the 2009 Version and I upgraded to the 2015 Version to get a version that would work with Delphi XE8.

ElPack is not LMD Innovative’s major product. They acquired it quite a while ago from ELDOS who I initially purchased the package from because I needed a treeview and grid with Unicode support. So LMD is maintaining it, and is slowly merging it with their core LMD products, but they are not doing much to enhance it.

They’ve added 64-bit and touch-based features. They fixed a number of bugs. And they’ve included a few new packages with ElPack like a DialogPack that I could make use of in the future.

EurekaLog improvements

EurekaLog traps errors that would otherwise crash Behold. It lets me display a message to inform the user there is a problem, and provides some information that might allow me to find and fix the problem. I also use it when I’m developing since it can help me find and fix memory leaks.

I first purchased EurekaLog Version 6 back in 2009. I initially used EurekaLog’s default dialogs and this allowed the users to email the problem to me. It caused me problems. Users complained. So I changed it:

I came up with my own form after careful thinking. I did not want a generic box. I wanted something that the user would know it was my program self-detecting the problem, and that it was not Windows telling them that my program had a problem. EurekaLog’s generic dialogs look too much like Windows. I attempted to fix the email problems with a "mailto" email. But even with that, the emailing was problematic, so I changed it to my current form, where I instead ask the user to drop off the bug information on the Behold feedback page:

EurekaLog’s improvements going from Version 6.x to 7.x involved a complete rewrite of their product. My old code wouldn’t work. I placed a support ticket with EurekaLog and Kevin of their support team worked with me and provided me a framework to continue to trap errors and provide my own form the way I had been doing.

Upgrading to Version 7 will provide 64-bit error trapping and better information for me for debugging purposes.

Overall

Upgrading to my new development environment that includes the latest versions of Delphi, TRichView, ElPack and EurekaLog took 14 days and involved about 400 recompilations of Behold.

Now I’ve got the tools available I’ll need to go forward and create a native Behold database to store your data. Then, with a place to store your edits, I’ll be able to add editing to Behold.