Advanced Xailer Techniques, Moving from other enviroments

[Original post by José Lalín]

Many people have told me they are very comfortable working with Xailer, they use it, or going to use it, for new projects because they don't want to re-write already finished and working applications.

For sure, no programming tool let you to move automatically from one enviroment to other: in the most of the cases, we can rescue the code that handle the data layer, but you always have to to make changes in the interface to fit your code to match the features of your new programming tool.

Comming from this, in the Xailer team we thought we could make something about, it and we decided to include an option in the IDE's menu that let you to import previously designed dialogs in Workshop.

Note: The import dialogs feature only works under .RC files, if you have a DLL or a previously compiled .RES file, you should export them to the .RC format, the most of the resource editors, including Workshop can do it for you with some mouse clicks.

To see how it works, let's go to the main menu, select TOOLS / IMPORT DIALOGS




Then you will see a form like this:



This form lets us, among other things:

• Select the .RC file to be imported
• To choose which dialogs we want to import
  
• If we want to see how the form is creating while importing
• Configure which custom control has an equivalent in Xailer

A simple sample of how it works: Let's suppouse we have a dialog with a Hernan's TWBrowse control, and we use it to display an array, and we also have a Manuel Mercado's TSButton.

Pressing the "Configure" button, we can easily make that a dialog defined TWBrowse turns into an Xailer's TArrayBrowse, and a TSButton to become into a Xailer's TBtnBmp.



Once imported, we will have a new FORM in our Xailer project with all the controls used in the original dialog, and we only have to do some minor stuff using the Objects Inspector and some mouse clicks.

I kindly invite you to play around a little with this option, and you will see how easily you can become an old dialog, into a powerful Xailer form.