Customizing a TListBox to resemble an Outlook list - delphi

Please down vote me if this is not appropriate, but I'm desperate to the point of pulling my hair out looking for this link. This is really a last resort.
Recently I browsed to a blog (at least I think it was) that had a very detailed description on how to modify a TListBox to have a multi-line look resembling some of the entries on an outlook list of emails, with a Title and the initial content. It was a particular good example because it had all the code for the modified TItem and TItemList objects and loads of images with that look
I've scoured my Firefox History, my Chrome history, my FeedDemon Feeds and my Google Bookmarks to no avail. I've done Google searches with TListBox, TListView, TItems, TItemList, Custom, Extending and some other variations and even looked 3 page results down to no avail...
Has anyone stumbled upon this article?
Please let an "old" man recover his memory, and his sanity :)
Cheers,
Gus

How to use is the one that "TListbox Ownerdraw Delphi" finds for me. Certainly Ownerdraw is what you are looking at to do this sort of thing. Good luck!

To answer my question with a proper answer:
Blaise Pascal Magazine Issue 4 November 2008 page 27.

Related

Delphi histogram component?

Does it happen that no one ever needs histogram in Delphi ?
Google gave me a bunch of half-baked code snippets. But it means that each time you need one - you have to invent one more ad hoc bycicle.
Torry mostly told me about some very expensive closed source Math Statistics or Financial packages, that as a subproduct have histograms. But they are very expensive and since you have no source code, each time you install update onto IDE/RTL/VCL you're probably screwed, until the vendor would make (soon ? ever?) updated packages. Given thatvendor is still does exists.
S.O. told me nothing, nil.
For what i found...
Mitov.com provides some histograms in PlotLab. which told to be free for non-commercial. Alas, it is again closed-source, and if the Histogram - quite fancy let's admit -is the onlything i need from it - why pay the whole price ?
One more example http://DSpatial.sf.net
Just few years ago i used it in Delphi 5, but even then i felt the author is loosing interest in the project. I made few enhancement, fixed some bugs, he merged them and that's all. The component was not very useful and lacked upon features, yet better than nothing. Now the project seems to be completely dead. Good old days, etc. But i do not want them back :-)
And Stack Overflow seemingly carries no single question about it. But maybe just no one bothered to create topic, after search found nothing ? I mean, Delphi was created for database access, histograms are one of basic ways to visualize data, and no one crosses them ? Something with nice style, with rich mouse tooltip like in HTML/CSS/JS on http://www.moskva.fm/stations/FM_95.2 ?
Or is this too domain-related and not ever possible to have good abstraction ?
TChart is a control that ships with most versions of Delphi. TChart can be used to make histograms (bar charts) in style. The following give you some ideas about how to use it: http://www.digitalcoding.com/tutorials/delphi/Simple-steps-to-create-Delphi-chart.html and http://delphi.about.com/od/adptips2006/qt/chart_selectbar.htm .
If you need something with code, google the pages at delphiforfun.org/programs/oscilloscope.htm . These are not controls. The oscilloscope article has a histogram with source. Some of the other projects at the site have other histogram graphs with source..not elegant but useful and free. Use them as a template to make your own control.
The link at http://delphiforfun.org/programs/Math_Topics/probability_distributions.htm shows how to make your own statistics displays with "histograms." This example makes use of TChart.
Here is some more stuff to try I found looking at my resource file:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/TAChart, http://members.home.nl/mvanwesten/en_lazarus.html , http://www.martinole.org/TAChart.html ...some of these are GPU components that supposedly work with some versions of Delphi. Perhaps this is your lucky day as there is some source code. The first and third listed probably will work reasonably for histograms. You may have to write your own statistics algorithms.
Found this thread while doing some searching. The ImageEn component suite has a THistogramBox component. It's the NOT prettiest thing in the world, but it's the only one I've found so far.
http://www.imageen.com
I came across a histogram example in a gdiplus package available for download from code central. I don't know if it will do what you need but when I saw it I remembered your SO question.
HTH.
If you were using firemonkey, you could just created a series of TRectangles in series. They can be made unclickable by turning hittest off. Or is that too easy and straightforward?

Where can I find the documentation for IdocScript for Stellent/Oracle UCM?

Where can I find the documentation for IdocScript for Stellent/Oracle UCM? I just got assigned to do maintenance on a page that uses it, and have no prior experience with either Stellent or the script. My specific problem has to do with string manipulation, but I can hardly find any documentation online at all, odd for a programming-related topic.
If you are after a book, there is the one by Brian Huff (Bex - http://bexhuff.com/) linked below.
Actually it is the only one. Written before Oracle bought Stellent and may be a missing some IDOC changes.
As a resourse tho it is very handy to have around as it touches on all things UCM (including a decent chunk on IDOC).
The Definitive Guide to Stellent Content Server Development
~ Brian Huff
Of course I answered my own question 15 minutes after I asked it. Oracle has a guide buried deep in its documentation website. It's available as a PDF or in HTML format (thanks, Raystorm).

Displaying right-to-left text in Team Explorer

We've started using TFS at work, and I'm migrating my bugs from the previous issue tracking software to TFS. All of them are written in Hebrew, a right-to-left language, but mixed with English words.
All the text fields in the TFS client are left-to-right, so I have to manually go and press Ctrl-Right-Shift in all the fields in order to read them properly.
Is there any way to change the default text orientation in TFS client?
I looked into customizing the work item form elements, for example here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms194963.aspx
but I couldn't find any attribute for changing the text orientation.
As far as I understand it there is not a way of changing the text orientation in the work item definition. I've passed your question along to some guys on the team in Microsoft to see if they know of anything.
is there an answer? Since then I continued searching for a way to do this, but I couldn't find any.
This is a serious usability issue for me, especially with the titles, which have mixed Hebrew-English. When displaying the issue titles I have to read "backwards". When scanning a lot of issues, this is a serious pain.
And I do not have the spare time to translate 500+ issues from Hebrew to English.

Setting up help for a Delphi app

What's the best way to set up help (specifically HTML Help) for a Delphi application? I can see several options, all of which has disadvantages. Specifically:
I could set HelpContext in the forms designer wherever appropriate, but then I'm stuck having to track numbers instead of symbolic constants.
I could set HelpContext programmatically. Then I can use symbolic constants, but I'd have more code to keep up with, and I couldn't easily check the text DFMs to see which forms still need help.
I could set HelpKeyword, but since that does a keyword lookup (like Application.HelpKeyword) rather than a topic jump (like Application.HelpJump), I'd have to make sure that each of my help pages has a unique, non-changing, top-level keyword; this seems like extra work. (And there are HelpKeyword-related VCL bugs like this and this.)
I could set HelpKeyword, set an Application.OnHelp handler to convert HelpKeyword requests to HelpJump requests so that I can assign help by topic ID instead of keyword lookup, and add code such as my own help viewer (based on HelpScribble's code) that fixes the VCL bugs and lets HelpJump work with anchors. By this point, though, I feel like I'm working against the VCL rather than with it.
Which approach did you choose for your app?
When I first started researching how to do this several years ago, I first got the "All About help files in Borland Delphi" tutorial from: http://www.ec-software.com/support_tutorials.html
In that document, the section "Preparing a help file for context sensitive help" (which in my version of the document starts on page 28). It describes a nice numbering scheme you can use to organize your numbers into sections, e.g. Starting with 100000 for your main form and continuing with 101000 or 110000 for each secondary form, etc.
But then I wanted to use descriptive string IDs instead of numbers for my Help topics. I started using THelpRouter, which is part of EC Software's free Help Suite at: http://www.ec-software.com/downloads_delphi.html
But then I settled on a Help tool that supported string ID's directly for topics (I use Dr. Explain: http://www.drexplain.com/) so now I simply use HelpJump, e.g.:
Application.HelpJump('UGQuickStart');
I hope that helps.
We use symbolic constants. Yes, it is a bit more work, but it pays off. Especially because some of our dialogs are dynamically built and sometimes require different help IDs.
I create the help file, which gets the help topic ID, and then go around the forms and set their HelpContext values to them. Since the level of maintenance needed is very low - the form is unlikely to change help file context unless something major happens - this works just fine.
We use Help&Manual - its a wonderful tool, outputting almost any format of stuff you could want, doc, rtf, html, pdf - all from the same source. It will even read in (or paste from rtf (eg MSWord). It uses topic ID's (strings) which I just keep a list of and I manually put each one into a form (or class) as it suits me. Sounds difficult but trust me you'll spend far longer hating the wrong authouring tool. I spent years finding it!
Brian

Graphing/Crystal Reports with ASP.Net MVC

I would like to add graphing to my User Controls in ASP.NET MVC. I am hoping for some ideas or a guide on how to approach this issue. I have searched around and found no helpful answers to resolve this issue. I was thinking of doing crystal reports but they don't boat over well in ASP.NET from my previous experience. I would just like to know some ways to go about tackling this problem. So again what I'm trying to do is add graphing to MVC User Controls from a ViewDataDictionary that's passed to my User Control.
You could go with google charts for free, or something like Dundas (which is EXCELLENT) if you are willing to pay.
I hope I've understood your question.
I have been happy using the JFreeChart.net graphing system. It is a port / semi-port of javas famous JFreechart. It has alot of capabilities, and the output looks very good.
It took me 30 minutes to do my first graph, but that was mostly because you have to pay for the documentation (not the code), so i was working off the samples, which I later found to be very adequate.
Screenshots and examples are shown here
alt text http://www.ujihara.jp/jbyjsharp/jfreechart/results/PieChartDemo1.png
alt text http://www.ujihara.jp/jbyjsharp/jfreechart/results/RingChartDemo1.png
Flex Charting, ChartDirector and Yahoo's Charts are decent. Chart Director has a good support net, and the guy is very responsive to questions and feature requests.
You could also check out .dot net charting. We've been using it for a few years at my job and it's worked fairly good for us. We build reports internally through various systems and it has served us well so far.

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