ImageLibrary 1.0.1 Support: omuller@omuller.com The ImageLibrary (ILib) package
contains a collection of Delphi components that lets you build a full
featured, self-contained database. You need no drivers or third parity tools.
You may create and configure your database from within the Delphi IDE or, for
full power, use the designer application that ships with the package. This presentation describes some
of the key points of the ImageLibrary database. It scratches the surface. To get
an impression of the full richness of the system, you may take a look at the
help file. More than Images!
Creating the GUI
Work styles
Master / detail processing
Action bars
Message bars
Schema buildersSpeed and capacity
Platforms and languages
More than images
The term “Image” is a bit
misleading: ILib has much more than images up the sleeve. In fact it
offers most of what you would expect from a database system: SQL support, transaction handling,
indexing, validation … But of course, living up to the name, images are given
special attention. Store them, search them, edit them, view them in different
formats; a lot of effort has been put into the system to make image handling
nice and easy. Creating the GUI
To view and edit data fields you
link them to native Delphi controls—or you use specialized ILib controls to
handle database operations in ways that Delphi natives cannot. Grid display
For grid view and editing ILib offers the TILDatasetViewer component that displays images and data in tabular formats. The viewer can have check boxes to handle multiple selection, signal validation states of the records, store html links to external resources … It can expand record lines to show multi line text fields or multi value fields. |
The dataset viewer
component operates in two modes: Image and text display. The highlighted
record displays the values of a “multi value” field, that means a field that
can have more than one individual value. Data aware controls and control panels By subclassing controls into
search and update controls you can make the controls perform advanced
operations that else would have required underlying SQL statements. This
feature is especially effective when controls are hosted by control panels.
At design time you can have control panels automatically generate and link
your controls. At run time the panels
organize control display according to the active work mode and field
selections. |