Delphi 2006, whenever started afresh, loses component package. This happens on a daily bases. We have component packages with custom VCL components that we wrote ourselves. When starting up Delphi 2006, nothing is noted. But as soon as I open a form that has some of these components on it, I receive
bds.exe - Unable To Locate Component
This application has failed to start
because DclOpusRep2006.bpl was not
found. Re-installing the application
may fix this problem.
When I then try to reinstall the component package, two things might happen:
I get an empy list of design packages and have to go to regedit to delete the package in question before being able to add it anew.
I get the list of design packages allright and it does show me the package in question as loaded and available.
The package is alsways available on a local drive, yet not the one Delphi resides on. Any ideas in troubleshooting?
Just to clarify my problem based on first answer: I am the sole developer on this project. The library has been installed from the same location it still resides and the path in the component packages list is correct.
The BPL or one of its dependencies could not be found. They may have been found during the installation of the package because of the current directory of the BDS process at the time but not found later because the current directory was then different.
Always make sure your BPLs and all their dependencies (statically linked BPLs and DLLs) are in a directory which is included in the system path.
I'm guessing the following may have happened:
The component package was installed
The file was moved (or perhaps 2 or more developers are using projects that use it, and the files live in different locations on their PC's)
Not all the paths were updated to reflect the new location.
My suggestion in this case would be to find all the project files that reference this component library and update the path.
If you are on a team and your team members have this file installed to different locations on each machine, standardise the location across all PC's.
Related
Using Embarcadero RAD Studio XE7, I wrote a runtime package containing a VCL component (it's a TGraphic descendent). Now I want to distribute this component, but only the compiled package without his source code. I cannot include it in the distribution because I wrote this package for a company that want to sell it and keep the control on his sources, so distributing the source code isn't an alternative in this case.
The component package depends on 2 other packages I also wrote. All of these packages are runtime, however a graphic filter is registered. After the package is installed, this filter allows me to open a new kind of image file from several native VCL components like TImage on my development computer. This behavior is very important and I want to keep it on the target IDEs.
Ideally I want my package to be installed on all RAD Studio platforms between XE and 10.2 Berlin. However I recently tried to compile my package in release on my devel computer and deploy it manually on another computer installed with RAD Studio XE4. The result was unconvincing:
Trying to install the .bpl file using the Component->Install packages... failed with a "The specified module could not be found" error. When opening the .bpl file with the Dependency Walker tool, I noticed that several dependencies like RTL210.bpl were missing
I also read somewhere that only design time package may be installed this way, it is exact?
Putting all the files (.bpl, .lib, .hpp, ...) of one of my package manually in the XE4 common dirs, I was able to compile a test project successfully. However several functions in my package were unavailable (resulting to an unresolved external when trying to use them)
Although I have several past experience about software and package distribution, I must confess that I have absolutely no idea about how to build a such package for deployment. In all my past scenarios I always distributed the package projects and source codes, and let the user install them on their own IDE.
I searched information about that in the past days but I found nothing. So if somebody can explain how to achieve a such package, or can point me to a document or website describing the process, or eventually give the name of a tool that can do the job, I would be very grateful to him.
Regards
If you don't want to to distribute the source files, you then need to provide the .dcu and bpl files. As Uwe says, you need different packages for each Delphi distribution.
What I have done in the past is to create an installer which builds and registers the packages. You can find the full description here:
http://www.kouraklis.com/2016/10/build-and-install-packages-in-delphi-ide-using-innosetup/
I think you can modify the script to skip the call to MSBuild.
Hope this helps.
After installing a SVN version of graphics32, I cannot see the components in the ToolPallette. (Windows 8.1, Delphi XE)
I mean, I see the group Graphics32, but it's empty.
When I navigate to see Installed Packages, I see the package there, it's checked... and when I click on it, and then click on the "Components" button I can SEE the components, but again, on the component pallette they are not visible.
So I am having problems adding those components to my form.
I just upgraded from version 1.9.1 to version 2.0 (beta) from the SVN trunk because I need functionalities from the latest version, but I have problems installing it correctly.
Please help
Thank you
EDIT
After compiling and installing the library, I copied the dcu`s and the pas files to Delphi's folder in program files (Release and Debug), because that is what I do with all my components so I don't depend on later folder changes.
Graphics32 does not come with .dproj files, so you might have to do some adaptations regarding component installation / setup yourself. The reason why these file types are not included can be found here.
If you open the .dpk files in the IDE (for recent Delphi versions there are runtime and designtime packages) you can of course build and install the packages right away. The designtime package need to be installed otherwise they won't be shown in the IDE. It should show something like "Package [..]\GR32_DSGN_RSXE1.dpk has been installed". If you have not removed previously installed GR32 packages before you should also get a text for all the new components now installed.
To actually use the components in a project you need to have either the source files or the dcu files be found from Delphi. As mentioned in the comments before this can either be the library or the search paths depending on what you want. For a better explanation see this question here on stackoverflow.
In short and as mentioned by Stefan Glienke in a Google+ post you shoud not put source files in your library path as it will cause the files to recompile each time you compile your project.
Instead, you should take some time configuring the packages options in advance (before building / installation) to put the DCU / DCP directly into a place where it can be used. For example you can put something like
....\Lib\XE2\$(PLATFORM)\$(CONFIG)
into both packages 'Output path for units' AND 'DCP output path'.
Now after build/installation, just add the path specified there into the library path. In addition you can put the source path into the search path, so that a [CTRL] + Click will find the code as well.
The advantage of this is that the library will be used with the package options, which might differ from your project's options.
As said, other ways are possible here including installing the components directly into a global library path.
This might not explain why the components are not visible in your project, but maybe you should just remove the existing packages (delete them from the list, not only uncheck), restart the IDE and reinstall the packages as mentioned above.
Installing components under Delphi XE3 is a nightmare.
First I need to add source files to
Tools -> Options -> Library
then I need to find a normal package and compile it
finally I need to find design time package and install it.
This is just quite tedious and error prone. Is there a nicer way to install components?
I have found Delphi Package Installer. Unfortunately it doesn't support Delphi XE3 or above.
I have heard that there is something similar which produces exe packages that install themselves (something like Inno Setup) but I can't find such thing.
No. The steps above are required.
First, adding the file path to Tools->Options->Delphi Options->Library Path is so the compiler knows where to find the files to compile them. (Actually, it's not required - you can eliminate this step by making sure that the .dpk files are in the same folder as the .pas files, and that all .pas file names are listed in the includes section in the .dpk. If the .pas files are in a different location, you'll need to either use relative paths in the .dpk (eg., MyComponents in '..\Source\MyComponents.pas') or add the location of the .pas files to Project->Options->Delphi Compiler->Search Path.)
The next step (finding the "normal package") is in order to build the runtime package. It's required, because the design-time package (next step) requires the code that's in that package in order to function in the Form Designer. It's also needed when you decide to build your application with runtime packages, if you use the third-party components and want to distribute the runtime package for it.
The separate design-time package (the third step) is required because designtime code can only be used at design-time; there's nothing that can be distributed with an application if it's built with runtime packages and the package build in step 2 is one of them.
This has been the way components are installed since around Delphi 3 or so, and the requirement to separate out designtime code into it's own package started being advised in Delphi 5 and enforced in Delphi 6 (when they relocated much of the IDE designtime support into their own separate packages and stopped distributing the source for them).
There really are no other options, unless the vendor supplies pre-build designtime and runtime packages for you, or supplies an installer that will do all of the above steps. (Most don't.) But if you update your Delphi version, you'd still have to go through the steps above.
What about the built-in component installer? It is part of Delphi XE, XE2 and XE3 and a description can be found here (I wrote it). It will even install components in C++Builder. You can instal into an existing package or into a new one, which it will create for you.
I would say that the best way to install components is to use your build manager (for example FinalBuilder) and add each component to a manager-project file which sets the necessary paths, builds the DPK files, and 'installs' the component in the IDE by making a registry entry. That way you have a documented procedure which allows you reliably to set up or repair your complete, tested, Delphi development environment. You can simply re-run the project when a component has been updated and tested. It is also quite easy to tweak an existing project to handle a new Delphi version.
The big disadvantage of a vendor-supplied installer is that all the ones I have seen simply overwrite the previous version on updates. I prefer to control the install myself, so that I have previous component source versions archived and available for comparison, in case testing reveals a problem with an upgrade. The 'one-click install' sounds fine, until a minor component upgrade suddenly causes your application to stop working.
Take a look at "Lazy Delphi Builder". It was created to simplify build/installation of many components at once. It resolves packages dependencies automatically. Free to use.
Link to some old tutorial
One of the dread errors with design-time packages in Delphi, which means packages that register install new components onto your Palette, is this error:
Component TSomething can't be registered by package something_design.bpl
because it has already been registered by package something_design.bpl.?
I already know this much:
If you had two copies of the BPL and you loaded one, but another package that depends on the BPL tries to load another, and it tries to load a second copy, you get this error.
Sometimes, there are weird things about implicit imports that require you to fix the implicit import warnings, clean all your artifacts up (dcu,dcp etc) and try again, and this goes away.
However, in the case that NEITHER of the above is fixing the problem, how do you fix the problem?
It seems to me, that there is only one copy of this BPL on my hard drive, and the path points to it, and somehow, a package is doing a "stealthy" background load of the package, before the IDE can see it, and then the IDE itself tries to load a package which has gotten loaded into the memory of the IDE using the Win32 call LoadLibrary and the second load which is the IDE trying to load this package, is causing a failure.
I'm looking for:
A. How to figure out what is wrong, and how to fix it.
B. Ways to avoid this (defensive practices or tools to scan your packages or your delphi IDE configuration.)
C. Workarounds. For example, I have found that launching Delphi ide (bds.exe) with the -np parameter, then loading my project later, not at initial IDE startup time, sometimes works around the problem by delaying project/form opens until a later time, when the Delphi IDE seems more stable.
First, are you working in XE?
I struggled with this after I made a component to replace the calendar earlier this year. I'm still not exactly sure what fixed it. But I believe the error has to do with the paths. Ensure it's not included twice by being visible to 2 path definitions.
If it's being used, you should be able to see what packages are included.
Hope you can make sense out of this, I'm still wondering what I did back then.
With all other aspects being correct (paths, # of copies, etc)...I experience this problem when my IDE package is dependent on other (3rd party) packages already installed into the IDE. The KEY is to get the other package loaded so that when you build your package, it recognizes the proper "Requires" and launches the dialog for you to agree to add it. You can load the other package by adding an empty new project alongside your package in the Project Manager and throwing some of the 3rd party controls onto a form. Now when you compile your package, it should see the other package and include it in the Requires list.
I suppose you could add the ForceDemandLoadState(dlDisable) into the 3rd party package, but who would want to?
I am trying to create an installation disk with InstallAware Express for my Delphi 2010 application. I have selected (checked)
CodeGear Database Express12
CodeGear Visual Component Library 12
for Application Runtime.
When I try to build it, I will get an error message
Error during build: No files matching pattern "C:\Windows\system32\*120.bpl"
The message will go away if I un-check the above runtime but of coz the program will not run.
Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong?
Also... I have use their scan file button to scan the dependent files base on my application.exe and installaware put a list of files in the $TARGETDIR$, should I leave them there or I am suppose to move them to various folder (e.g. some of the files are from the windows\system32 directory...)
Thanks a lot.
FWIW, one of the great things about Delphi is that you can pretty much install on any system without worry if you turn off the "build with packages" option. This would eliminate the need for these files, and solve your problem, and also make the application more robust against updates and changes. IMO packages are only needed if you are building multi-module applications which are more advanced, and in that case you wouldn't want to be using any Express installer.
You can manually add the files.
To find out which VCL packages your application uses, open the project in the IDE. Use the menu item Project->Build project to rebuild your entire application, and then use Project->Information to view the information dialog. The list of packages actually required by (and therefore needing to be distributed with) your application are listed there.
Where to install them on the destination system depends on why you're using packages in the first place. If you're using runtime packages simply to reduce the download size for your users, and the packages will only be used by this single application, put them in the same folder as your application ($TARGETDIR$). If you're using them because you've got several different applications, and they'll all be installed in different locations but use the same runtime packages, install them in the System32 folder ($SYSDIR$, if I remember correctly).
InnoSetup works fine with runtime packages manually added, btw, especially if you use the excellent (and also free) ISTool IDE. (Not affiliated in any way; just a happy customer.)
Did you have Delphi 2010 installed on this machine? If so, you should see several bpl files under C:\Windows\system32 folder.