Is Delphi XE5 TZipFile able to handle encrypted/password protected zip files?
Or must users use third party software to handle this?
Any help would be appreciated.
Looking at the source code for System.Zip, I see no indication of anything that would allow working with encrypted Zip files. There is no provision for specifying a password for either zipping or extracting files or creating a Zip archive.
You could always include support for encrypted archives using Turbo Power Abbrevia, open-sourced several years ago by Turbo Power. It's been updated to support XE5, according to the SVN repository for the project at SourceForge. It's maintained quite well by the contributors to the project, comes with full source code, and is cross-platform (Windows, OS X, and Linux, at least - I don't see any indication of Android or iOS support).
Related
I've created some components in Delphi and I would like to give them to somebody else for use, but without source code.
I use the latest version of Delphi (10.2 Tokyo).
What are the steps I need to follow? Thank you!
If you want to share components in Delphi without source code, you must ensure that the other user has the exact same version of Delphi as you have[1]. This won't work with a different version. Note that it does not have to be the same SKU, i.e. you can have Professional or Community and the other can have, say, Enterprise. Only the version (e.g. Berlin 10.1, Tokyo 10.2, etc.) is important.
Then you can either
put them in a package and distribute the bpl and dcp files.
distribute the dcu files.
or both (preferrable)
Note that the user will have to install these. There are instructions in the help files on how to do that (no link, sorry, as the DocWiki seems to be down right now). Note that the package must be in one of the paths in the Windows DLL search order.
You could of course also write an installer, using one of the installer creating applications like InnoSetup (no association), but that is a topic of its own.
[1] That is the reason that many Delphi developers prefer components or classes with source and would not accept or buy one of these without source. Having the source also allows you to fix little bugs.
Delphi IDE uses InstallAware as installer in last few releases (2010, XE, XE2, XE3, XE4). Using the normal setup.exe installation will copy a few GB of files into c:\programdata if you install all the IDE releases.
The installer consumes disk spaces quickly especially for users who use an SSD hard disk that is expensive.
Is it possible to setup the Delphi IDEs without copying files to c:\ProgramData? Is it advisable to delete those files manually after installation too? Uninstalling a previous version of the IDE does delete these files but as component maker, I need those IDEs for testing.
Partial answer here.
Is it advisable to delete those files manually after installation too?
Of course, official answer is NO. But you actually can delete these files at the cost of losing installer's "Repair" capability. (Repair is standard MSI feature, and InstallAway is merely yet another front-end for MSI). Also, it will render any manual restoration of particular file impossible, since files are stored in encrypted 7-zip archives on distribution medium (yet another unfriendly feature).
Unfortunately, I do not know any way to disable creation of such local copy of distribution medium.
I have used the Synactis product PDF-in-the-box in Delphi 2006 projects and also a free component they had called TPDFViewer, which allows you to embed a PDF viewer in your application.
I am porting one app to XE and - having found that trying to install the TPDFViewer I had in XE did some serious damage to my installation - I'm looking for a replacement.
I have installed XE-supported trial versions of their current offerings PDF-in-the-box 4.04 and All-in-the-box 4.04 but can't see any sign of the TPdfViewer component in either. Their website FAQ implies this functionality has been replaced by functions to start Adobe Reader.
So I want a (free would be nice, but not essential) PDF viewer for Delphi XE which doesn't just chain to Adobe Reader and allows user interaction or programmatic control over zoom, page number etc.
I tried several times to find a good PDF viewer. Most of them were fake components. The best way is to embed acrobat reader dll directly into your application and command it from there.
It was 8 years ago, so I do not remember the code that I used to do this. You import the acroXX.dll file directly into Delphi, it prepares a user component for you and then you install this component directly in to your Component palette.
The worst thing in this configuration is that you have to take care of the acrobat reader dll that is installed on your clients. Any update/upgrade of the reader may cause your application to fail.
I need to compress multiple files into a single archive using Delphi. I'd prefer to use freeware components or open-source components because I am very very cheap :-)
My primary requirements are:
Possible to encrypt the archive
Can create common archives that can be opened by anyone with a copy of WinZip
Does anyone have suggestions with components that they have used? Please feel free to suggest free as well as commercial components/libraries.
Perhaps DelphiZip is what you are looking for, it seems to support encryption, too, and is WinZip compatible. It is released under LGPL.
KaZip is an open-source ZIP archiver. Here is its description:
KAZIP is fast, simple ZIP archiver and
dearchiver which uses most popular ZIP
format.Inflate - Deflate zip
compression format (no encryption
support and no multidisk
support).KAZip is totaly based on
Delphi VCL - no DLL, ActiveX or other
external libraries.KAZip is totaly
stream oriented so you can deal with
data only in memory without creating
temporary files, etc. If you need to
add zip-unzip functionality to your
application,KAZIP is the right
solution. Additional ZipListView and
ZipTreeView components for easy
visualisation.Functionality:Zip-Unzip
using Inflate-DeflateBZip2 unzipping
trough usage of BZIP2 units from
Edison Mera Menndez.Functions:Adding
Files, Folders, Streams; Selecting,
Deselecting, Checking;Extracting to
files and streams;Delete and Rename
filesCreate, Delete and Rename
foldersTest, RepairMany new properties
and methods, improved speed.A very
complex Zip Browser demo application
is included
It is not compatible with Delphi 2009 yet, but with some minor changes in the source code, you can make it work in Delphi 2009 too. Actually, that's what I did.
Regards
I`m using madZip from madCollection
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned JclCompression yet - it's part of the well-known Jedi Code Library (JCL).
Here's a view of the unit itself : http://jcl.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/jcl/trunk/jcl/source/common/JclCompression.pas?view=markup
Note, it's compatible with 7-zip DLL version 4.64 - newer versions might not be backwards-compatible...
I recommend the $69 ZipForge from ComponentAce.
You could use 7zip (LZMA) bindings for Pascal (compatible with Delphi): http://www.birtles.org.uk/programming/
Another Delphi resource to look at would be InnoSetup. The source code is available and with a little work might give you an edge up on what your trying to do. There is an option to create self extracting zip archives which are compatible with WinZip,
My thoughts are not to use the program, but to use his source as a starting point since it is very heavily tested and extremely solid.
There are infozips zip32 and unzip32 dlls. They can be used from Delphi (even from Visual Basic), there are interface units/modules for both. The interface isn't as good as I would have liked it, but it works.
In the company that i work, we develop all the GUI in C#, but the application kernel is mainly developed in Delphi 5 (for historical reasons), with a lot of components made in COM+. Related to this very specific sort of application a I two questions:
Experienced guys in Delphi and/or COM, do you have any workrounds to work with the buggy TLB interface ?
Some of the bugs are: IDE crashing during edition of a large TLB, lost of methods IDs, TLB corruption, etc.
Here, we haven't found any good solution. Actually we tried do upgrade do the new 2007 version. But the new IDE TLB interface has the same bugs that we found before.
How do you control TLBs versions ? The TLB file is in a binary format and conflict resolutions are very hard to do. We tried to do it exporting the interfaces descriptions to IDL and commiting into CVS, but we didn't found any good way to generate TLBs from IDL using Delphi. Additionaly, the MIDL tool provided by Microsoft, didn't parse correctly the IDL files that we exported from delphi.
I think you should have a good look at Delphi 2009.
Delphi 2009 has changes to the COM support, including a text-based replacement for the binary TLB files.
You can read more on Chris Bensen's blog.
In the distant past (before I started working for CodeGear) I gave up on the odd Delphi-ized IDL language that the IDE presented, and wrote my own IDL and compiled it using MS midl. This largely worked; the only catch, IIRC, was making sure dispids (id attribute) were correct on automation interfaces (dispinterfaces) for property getters & setters - there was some invariant that tlibimp expected but midl didn't guarantee.
However, now that Delphi 2009 uses a safe subset of midl syntax, and includes a compiler for this midl in the box and integrated into the IDE, these problems should be a thing of the past.
We have also just installed Delphi 2009 and it does seem to have improved the support for Typelibraries. However I have worked with COM and type libraries for quite some time and here are my general gotchas that I have found over the years. I would agree its pretty buggy and is all the way up to Delphi 2006 (our version prior to using 2009).
Always have every file writeable before opening. This may sound obvious, but when working with source control sometimes we forget to do this and try to remove readonly flag after opening a file - Delphi cant deal with this. Ensure tlb is writable before opening.
If editing a standalone typelibrary you MUST have a project open. For some reason if you open a type library on its own it will not save. Create a blank project and then open your typelibrary. For some reason this allows the type library to be saved.
If your type library is used by an application or COM+ ensure that application is shut down or COM+ disabled before opening the type library. Any open apps will prevent the type library from being saved.
However I think your best solution is probably an upgrade. You get Unicode support too.
Using Delphi 2009 has greatly taken much of the pain out of huge TLB files, and conversion of our existing objects was painless, but our com objects don't use any third party libraries.
We will be migrating our gui applications over once the library vendors release supported versions.
Same experience with the TLB interface here: we simply stopped using it.
We work with several separate IDL files (hand-build) for different parts of our framework, making use of the #include construct to include them into the IDL of the actual application, then generate the single tlb using MIDL and tlibimp it. If the application has no IDL of it's own, pre-compiled version of the different framework TLB files are available.
Whenever the framework enters a new version, a script is run to re-generate the GUIDS on all necessary interfaces in the IDL files.
This has served us well for many years, and for us to move over the new Delphi 2009 IDL/TLB toolset will have to be not only integrated into the IDE, but also versatile when it comes to automated builds and whatnot. Can't wait to get my hands dirty with some experiments!