Yesterday was a very strange and frustrating day. Inbetween the many times that I spent in our security room, I continued to work on migrating the management ERP program to Delphi 12/Unicode/Win11. I continued in the same vein as Friday, migrating the forms needed to create a minimal version of the program that actually does something.
By about lunchtime, I had a clean compilation with maybe 30 different units (I haven't counted them) but when I came to run the program, it didn't progress after the splash screen, displaying the error 'Class FMTBCD not known'. I recognised this name as it is one of three units (the others being SqlExpr and Provider) that dbExpress adds to units that use that kind of database component. I hadn't been diligent in deleting these units from the source files, so first I had to do a global search then removed them from about 15 different units.
After recompiling, I still had this error, so the next step was to look for persistent field variables defined as TFMTBcdField (or similar). There were a small number of such variables, but replacing them was problematic as that definition came from the DFM files. So I added some more replacement rules to the DFM migrator to handle this case. I should point out that sometimes adding what seems to be a simple change to the migrator is actually quite complicated. For example, I had some such fields that had to be redefined as TFloatField, but as the fields in the original DFMs had properties such as 'precision' and 'size' that TFloatField does not have, these lines have to be excluded from the transfer - not so easy. These changes are required because Delphi 12 Community Edition deliberately excludes certain types.
Even after changing the type of these variables, I was still getting the error message. Eventually I tracked it down to one specific query in the data module, an 'invisible' query that has several fields defined as BCDs. Changing these was very difficult but eventually I succeeded. But was that the end of my problems? No - first there was TMemoField then TSmallintField. Fortunately it was easy to overcome these problems by directly editing the appropriate DFM file.
Then when I thought that I had a clean compilation and no run time errors, Windows' Access Control had to stick his ugly head into the process, so I had to spend a frustrating hour or so getting a certificate, saving it into the certificate manager and thence into the Delphi compiler. Fortunately I won't have to do this again, although I may have to copy what is equivalent to a small batch file when I work on another program.
Finally at about 7 pm, after a very long and stressful day, the program compiled and actually ran. I could bring up the list of customers! This may not seem much, but to get this far required fixing and compiling many units and overcoming what can only be described as overhead. Of course, very little on this form works at the moment, but the remaining problems here are relatively easy to fix.
And once that's done, then I'll have to start the process over again, finding important forms that need to be compiled and then the units that support those forms. The 'DoCustomers' form is used for three different tables and requires 18 different user forms in its 'uses' statement, so completing this form will be an important milestone. Then there is the 'DoDockets' form with about 20 different supporting forms, and the 'DoTables' form with maybe 30 forms. Once these are completed, then 'there only remains' about 40 report forms, but these should be relatively simple to migrate as they are all based on the same template.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 67 | Donating blood | Health, Donating blood, BCC | |
| 236 | More MBA | MBA, Economics | |
| 338 | Pre-exam nerves | MBA, Randy Newman, Marketing | |
| 815 | Last of the luddites (2) | Computers |
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