Extended String Property Editor

   
Release: 2.0
Date: 21 July 2011
Delphi Compatibility:
Key
 D1   D2   D3   D4   D5   D6   D7  D2005 D2006 D2007 D2009 D2010  DXE  DXE2
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Overview

This extension of Delphi's string property editor has been designed to get round two limitations of the standard property editor:

  1. You can't enter multi-line strings with embedded CR/LF characters via the object inspector. Such strings can only be assigned at run-time.
  2. Although Delphi strings have a 2Gb size limit, the standard property editor only accepts strings up to 255 characters long. Once again, longer strings must be assigned at run-time.

The enhanced property editor works with string and TCaption properties. It adds an ellipsis button to the right hand side of the data entry area in the object inspector. Clicking this button displays a dialog box in which the property's value can be entered. Pressing return in the dialog box starts a new line. There is no practical limit to the length of strings that can be entered.

Clicking OK (or pressing Ctrl+Return) causes the entered text to be assigned to the property. If, or how, any newline characters will be displayed in the object inspector depends on the version of Delphi being used.

The edit dialog is resizable. Word wrapping can be switched on or off. Both the word-wrapping and dialog box size and position are persistent. The dialog box has a toolbar that provides buttons to:

  • Select all the text in the editor.
  • Clear all the text from the editor.
  • Overwrite the editor's existing text with text from the clipboard.
  • Copy all the text from the editor to the clipboard.
  • Undo the last edit.
  • Load text into the editor from a file.
  • Save the contents of the editor to a file.
  • Display online help.

In addition the normal cut, copy and paste operations are available via a context menu and the usual keywboard shortcuts.

Screen shots

Our first screen shot is of the extended string editor dialog box, called from Delphi 2010, displaying a two line string.

Extended String Property Editor Screen Shot

The second screen shot shows the object inspector displaying a multi-line string in a label's caption. This caption has been entered using the extended string property editor. The ellipsis button displays the editor when clicked.

Object Inpsector Screen Shot

As can be seen above we are editing a TLabel. The final screenshot shows the label on a form at design time, displaying the two lines of text.

Form screen shot