Recent

Author Topic: Concise, accurate, relevant, well-structured documentation for Lazarus  (Read 2029 times)

orionyx

  • New member
  • *
  • Posts: 8
I have been struggling with Lazarus for 2 months now. I use a Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 18.04, 8 Gb RAM, 500 Gb hard drive.
I have several years' experience with BCB ^, a delight to use. And with Microsoft Visual studio, horribly overblown, with hopscotch documentation (i.e. every sentence sends you hopping to another link).
Now with FP and lazarus, all i want to do at present is write a couple of programs accessing MariaDB databases using a GUI, and designing the forms at design time, not coding them at run time. As I understand things, that's the whole purpose of RAD, and Borland did that very well.
But with lazarus, i can't find good documentation anywhere. As one example: I want to design grids, both data-linked and not, and I want to design them at design time. where is the documentation? The documentation that seems most complete is this: Michaël Van Canneyt - Free Pascal Reference guide, version 3.0.2 (2017). However - try looking up the TDBstringGrid in it. When you have failed at that, just give up and look up 'grid'. I got 2 hits in the whole 3700+ pages, neither of them relevant or helpful.
When i try to design the grid, i find that you can do some things such as lay out the  columns in the column editor - but the layout does not carry over to the grid you are trying to edit. in any case, why do you have to click in a half-dozen different places to achieve one simple task? Perhaps somewhere there is a tutorial, but who can tell?
I think that a free, open-source RAD package along the lines of Delphi is a good idea. Perhaps a group of people can get together, develop one, and then tell everyone about it, how to get it, and how to use it.

marcov

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *
  • Posts: 11352
  • FPC developer.
Grids are GUI, and thus pat of Lazarus.  The best chance is either lcl.chm or the wiki  Base concepts are the same as Delphi..


engkin

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3112
Unlike TDBGrid and TStringGrid, isn't "TDBstringGrid" a 3rd party control?

ASBzone

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 678
  • Automation leads to relaxation...
    • Free Console Utilities for Windows (and a few for Linux) from BrainWaveCC
However - try looking up the TDBstringGrid in it. When you have failed at that, just give up and look up 'grid'. I got 2 hits in the whole 3700+ pages, neither of them relevant or helpful.

Have you seen the following?

http://wiki.freepascal.org/TDBGrid
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Grids_Reference_Page#Differences_between_Lazarus_and_Delphi_grids


-ASB: https://www.BrainWaveCC.com/

Lazarus v2.2.7-ada7a90186 / FPC v3.2.3-706-gaadb53e72c
(Windows 64-bit install w/Win32 and Linux/Arm cross-compiles via FpcUpDeluxe on both instances)

My Systems: Windows 10/11 Pro x64 (Current)

 

TinyPortal © 2005-2018