Is there any integrated solution in Delphi 2007 to check whether a TStringList contains a part of a certain value?
e.g.:
List.AddObject('This is a string', customStringObject1);
List.AddObject('This is a mushroom', customStringObject2);
List.AddObject('Random stuff', customStringObject3);
Searching for "This is a" is supposed to deliver me "true", since the first two elements contain this partwise.
The only method i'm aware of so far is TStringList.find(string,integer), but this performs a complete string comparision, i.e. only searching for This is a string will return true.
Any suggestions?
Not integrated, but you can use the Pos function on the Text property:
Pos('This is a', List.Text)
And if you want it to be integrated, you can create a class helper for TStrings.
Not directly, no. You would have to either:
1) call Pos() on the Text property, which is not efficient if you have a lot of strings.
2) loop through the list manually, calling Pos() on each String. More efficient, but also more coding.
3) derive a new class from TStringList and override its virtual CompareStrings() method to compare strings however you want (the default implementation simple calls AnsiCompareStr() or AnsiCompareText(), depending on the CaseSensitive property). Return 0 if you find a match. You can then use the TStringList.Find() method, which calls CompareStrings() internally (be careful, so does TStringList.Sort(), but you can avoid that if you call TStringList.CustomSort() instead).
Related
I found JavaFX to be suprisingly expressive after getting over the fact that I had to redeclare every field as property so I am a little stumped and would like to know if there is a better, more idomatic way of binding a boolean to some more complex operation like adding and removing style classes.
In this example I have a project that maybe valid or not and I want the font color of the tab to indicate which it is. I am doing this by adding and removing the error style class:
val errorSwitch = { valid : Boolean ->
logger.debug {"errorSwitcher: $valid"}
if( valid) tab.styleClass.remove("error")
else tab.styleClass.add("error")
Unit
}
product.isValid.onChange (errorSwitch)
errorSwitch(product.isValid.value)
What I don't like here is that I have to call the function once myself to start with because "onChange" obviously does not trigger unless the isValid actually changes. It's a small thing but I am wondering if there isn't a better way with bindings because thats what I want: the presence of the error class should be bound to "isValid"
In TornadoFX the best way to achieve this is to use the toggleClass function, which will automatically add or remove a given class based on a boolean observable value. Therefore you can simply say:
tab.toggleClass(Styles.error, product.isValid)
This example requires you to use the Type Safe CSS feature of TornadoFX. Read more about Type Safe CSS in the guide :)
What's the preferred way of getting a value in swift?
Using a read-only variable
var getString: String? {
return "Value"
}
or using a function?
func getString() -> String? {
return "Value"
}
Also, is there a performance difference between the two?
First, neither of these would be appropriate names. They should not begin with get. (There are historical Cocoa meanings for a get prefix that you don't mean, and so even if you mean "go out to the internet and retrieve this information" you'd want to use something like fetch, but certainly not in the case you've given.)
These issues are addressed in various sections of the Swift API Design Guidelines. First, a property is a property, whether it is stored or computed. So there is no difference in design between:
let someProperty: String?
and
var someProperty: String? { return "string" }
You should not change the naming just because it's computed. We can then see in the guidelines:
The names of other types, properties, variables, and constants should read as nouns.
Furthermore, as discussed in The Swift Programming Language:
Properties associate values with a particular class, structure, or enumeration. Stored properties store constant and variable values as part of an instance, whereas computed properties calculate (rather than store) a value.
So if this is best thought of as a value associated with the type (one of its "attributes"), then it should be a property (computed or stored). If it is something that is not really "associated" with the type (something that the caller expects this type to retrieve from elsewhere for instance), then it should be a method. Again from the Design Guidelines:
Document the complexity of any computed property that is not O(1). People often assume that property access involves no significant computation, because they have stored properties as a mental model. Be sure to alert them when that assumption may be violated.
If "stored properties as a mental model" doesn't match what you mean to express, then it probably shouldn't be a property in the first place (and you need to document the discrepancies if you make it a property anyway). So, for instance, accessing a property should generally have no visible side effects. And if you read from a property immediately after writing to it, you should get back the value you wrote (again, as a general mental model without getting into the weeds of multi-threaded programming).
If you use a method, it can often result in a different appropriate name. See the "Strive for Fluent Usage" section of the Design Guidelines for more on that. There are several rules for selecting good method names. As a good example of when to use properties vs methods, consider the x.makeIterator(), i.successor() and x.sorted() examples and think about why these are methods and why they're named as they are. This is not to say there is exactly one answer in all cases, but the Design Guidelines will give you examples of what the Swift team intends.
With no discernible difference in performance, make the choice for readability:
When an attribute behaves like a variable, use a property. Your example falls into this category.
When reading an attribute changes object state, use a function. This includes
Attributes that behave like a factory, i.e. returns new objects when you access them
Attributes that produce new values, such as random number generators
Peripheral readers
Input iterators
Of course, if the attribute is computed based on one or more argument, you have no other choice but to use a function.
Just as a note: If you want to use both getters and setters in Swift you can do as follows:
var myString: String {
get {
return "My string"
}
set {
self.myPrivateString = newValue
}
}
This way you can access your value as if it was a regular variable, but you can do some "under-the-hood magic" in your getters and setters
I'm working on the verification of an interface formalised in the OMG's IDL, and am having problems finding a definitive answer on the semantics of getting an attribute value. In an interface, I have an entry...
interface MyInterface {
readonly attribute SomeType someName;
};
I need to know if it is acceptable for someObj.someName != someObj.someName to be true (where someObj is an instance of an object implementing MyInterface).
All I can find in OMG documentation in regards to attributes is...
(5.14) An attribute definition is logically equivalent to declaring a
pair of accessor functions; one to retrieve the value of the attribute
and one to set the value of the attribute.
...
The optional readonly keyword indicates that there is only a single
accessor function—the retrieve value function.
Ergo, I'm forced to conclude that IDL attributes need not be backed by a data member, and are free to return basically any value the interface deems appropriate. Can anyone with more experience in IDL confirm that this is indeed the case?
As we know, IDL interface always will be represented by a remote object. An attribute is no more then a syntatic sugar for getAttributeName() and setAttributeName(). Personally, i don't like to use attribute because it is hardly to understand than a simply get/set method.
CORBA also has valuetypes, object by value structure - better explaned here. They are very usefull because, different from struct, allow us inherit from other valuetypes, abstract interface or abstract valuetype. Usualy, when i'm modeling objects with alot of
get/set methods i prefer to use valuetypes instead of interfaces.
Going back to your question, the best way to understand 'attribute' is looking for C#. IIOP.NET maps 'attribute' to properties. A property simulates a public member but they are a get/set method.
Answering your question, i can't know if someObj.someName != someObj.someName will return true or false without see the someObj implementation. I will add two examples to give an ideia about what we can see.
Example 1) This implementation will always return false for the expression above:
private static i;
public string getSomeName() {
return "myName" i;
}
Example 2) This implementation bellow can return true or false, depending of concurrency or 'race condition' between clients.
public string getSomeName() {
return this.someName;
}
public setSomeName(string name) {
this.someName = name;
}
First client can try to access someObj.someName() != someObj.someName(). A second client could call setSomeName() before de second call from the first client.
It is perfectly acceptable for someObj.someName != someObj.someName to be true, oddly as it may seem.
The reason (as others alluded to) is because attributes map to real RPC functions. In the case of readonly attributes they just map to a setter, and for non-readonly attributes there's a setter and a getter implicitly created for you when the IDL gets compiled. But the important thing to know is that an IDL attribute has a dynamic, server-dictated, RPC-driven value.
IDL specifies a contract for distributed interactions which can be made at runtime between independent, decoupled entities. Almost every interaction with an IDL-based type will lead to an RPC call and any return value will be dependent on what the server decides to return.
If the attribute is, say, currentTime then you'll perhaps get the server's current clock time with each retrieval of the value. In this case, someObj.currentTime != someObj.currentTime will very likely always be true (assuming the time granularity used is smaller than the combined roundtrip time for two RPC calls).
If the attribute is instead currentBankBalance then you can still have someObj.currentBankBalance != someObj.currentBankBalance be true, because there may be other clients running elsewhere who are constantly modifying the attribute via the setter function, so you're dealing with a race condition too.
All that being said, if you take a very formal look at the IDL spec, it contains no language that actually requires that the setting/accessing of an attribute should result in an RPC call to the server. It could be served by the client-side ORB. In fact, that's something which some ORB vendors took advantage of back in the CORBA heyday. I used to work on the Orbix ORB, and we had a feature called Smart Proxies - something which would allow an application developer to overload the ORB-provided default client proxies (which would always forward all attribute calls to the server hosting the target object) with custom functionality (say, to cache the attribute values and return a local copy without incurring network or server overhead).
In summary, you need to be very clear and precise about what you are trying to verify formally. Given the dynamic and non-deterministic nature of the values they can return (and the fact that client ORBs might behave differently from each other and still remain compliant to the CORBA spec) you can only reliably expect IDL attributes to map to getters and setters that can be used to retrieve or set a value. There is simply no predictability surrounding the actual values returned.
Generally, attribute does not need to be backed by any data member on the server, although some language mapping might impose such convention.
So in general case it could happen that someObj.someName != someObj.someName. For instance attribute might be last access time.
I have a Delphi 6 class object that contains an array of 30 Variants, each of which is exposed via a different indexed property. For example:
property responseCode: integer
Index 7 read getIndexedProperty_integer write setIndexedProperty_integer;
I did this to make using the array of Variants easier (helps the IDE's auto-complete) and to provide type safety. It works fine but now I have a wrinkle. The array of Variants are initialized to NULL when the class that wraps it is constructed, so I can tell if a particular variant has ever been instantiated with a value. A consequence of this is if only some of the Variants are instantiated (given valid values), any attempt to access a property that currently represents a NULL Variant will cause a Variant conversion error when Delphi tries to convert the variant to the type declared by the indexed property.
I would much rather not declare an "isValid" property for each indexed property. I was wondering if there was a way to use the TypeInfo library to get the raw value of the underlying Variant without having to access the indexed property directly and thus triggering the conversion Exception. Then I could write code like (using the example property above):
isValidProperty(responseCode);
and that function would return TRUE if the Variant underlying the responseCode property is not NULL and FALSE if it is.
I know I can walk the PPropList property list for the class and access the properties by name, but then I would have to use code like:
isValidProperty('responseCode');
and pass the property name in string form instead of passing in the property directly like the first isValidProperty() above. Is there a way to do this?
So you want "to get the raw value of the underlying Variant without having to access the indexed property directly and thus triggering the conversion Exception". So long as you can access the underlying Variant itself, yes, you can. You will need to change the container class itself most likely.
From the Delphi XE2 help page on variant types:
The standard function VarType returns a variant's type code. The
varTypeMask constant is a bit mask used to extract the code from
VarType's return value, so that, for example,
VarType(V) and varTypeMask = varDouble
returns True if V contains a Double or an
array of Double. (The mask simply hides the first bit, which indicates
whether the variant holds an array.) The TVarData record type defined
in the System unit can be used to typecast variants and gain access to
their internal representation.
You should be able to use a combination of the methods and records mentioned here to find out anything you want about the internal data inside the variant, including if it's a NULL variant, as well as getting direct access to it.
(This system seems slightly dodgy design to me: it doesn't seem a very type safe implementation... see my comment above. I think a design based on the actual types of the values you are expecting might be safer. But, this will let you achieve your goal.)
In one of the Delphi demo applications, I've stumbled upon some syntax that I didn't know the Delphi compiler accepted:
// ......\Demos\DelphiWin32\VCLWin32\ActiveX\OleAuto\SrvComp\Word\
// Main.pas, line 109
Docs.Add(NewTemplate := True); // note the assignment
I can't seem to reproduce this type of parameter passing in my own code, and I never see anyone use it. So these are my questions:
Can i use this in "normal" methods and is it part of "the Delphi Language", or is this some compiler hack for automation objects?
What's needed in order to be able to use this?
Is this anything like C#4's named and optional parameters?
Additional information: I usually pass
records or simple classes when there
are many optional parameters to
methods, but it looks like I wouldn't
need that with this syntax. I'm aware
of default parameter values, but their
usefulness is limited because you
cannot provide any parameters to the
right of an omitted one. In JavaScript
I'm using this named parameter style
all the time (be it with different
syntax), and it's powerful.
Clearly the Delphi language supports named parameters since they appear right there in sample Delphi code. Delphi supports named parameters on automation objects, which are objects that implement the IDispatch interface. There are restrictions on the types the parameters and return types can have; in particular, they can't be Delphi classes.
I don't think the convenience you seek from named parameters would outweigh the performance hit you'd take by having every method call routed through the IDispatch.Invoke method. A call may also need to use GetIDsOfNames first. You don't see this in more code because late binding is usually something people try to avoid. Use early binding whenever possible to avoid the cost of looking up dispatch IDs and indirect method invocations.
Delphi supports optional parameters in non-automation code by allowing default values. You can omit the actual parameters for any parameter with a default value as long as you also omit the actual parameters of all subsequent parameters — the compiler ensures that a function's declaration allows for that.
I think optional parameters are overrated. They save time for the (one) person writing the code, but not for the (many) people reading the code. Whoever's reading it needs to know what the default values will be of any unspecified parameters, so you may as well just provide all the values explicitly anyway.
If you declare your procedure like so:
procedure DoSomething(AParam : integer = 0);
... it will assume a value of 0 for the parameter if it isn't given. As I recall, parameters with default values have to be at the end of the call, so like this:
procedure DoSomething(AFirstParam : string; AParam : integer = 0);
not like this:
procedure DoSomething(AParam : integer = 0; ASecondParam : string);
It is basically "some compiler hack for automation objects". I sometimes have to use it for Excel and Word automation.
e.g.
MSExcel.Application.Cells.Replace(What:='', Replacement:='', LookAt:=xlPart,
SearchOrder:=xlByRows, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=True, ReplaceFormat:=True);
Is equivalent to VBA
Application.Cells.Replace(What='', Replacement='', LookAt=xlPart, _
SearchOrder=xlByRows, MatchCase=False, SearchFormat=True, ReplaceFormat=True)