[Lazarus] Stand-alone (external) Form Designer?

[Mattias Gärtner]

Zitat von dmitry boyarintsev <skalogryz.lists at gmail.com>:

> I see no problems building external form designer.
> All you need is to read and write .lfm format. :)
>
> And since .lfm writting/reading is based on RTTI, any FPC program
> should support it, natively.

Reading/Writing is done by TReader/Writer in unit Classes, which uses  
a "driver" to input/output the real format.
lfm is just one possible format. There are other formats: You could  
use lrs, binary and xml.
Graeme prefers pascal. If someone would write a driver for pascal  
statements, the IDE would be able to read/write the form data directly  
to the unit. I guestimate it needs a few days including testing.
Then we could compile a special LCL without published properties to  
create smaller executables.


> as Hans-Peter has already noted, the biggest problem would be
> supporting custom (non LCL standard) controls, since in Lazarus
> they're rendering themselves. So either external Form designer must be
> LCL based, or must provide some way to render custom controls.

AFAIK all designers mentioned by Graeme only supports their own  
widgetset. Maybe they have some interfaces like Lazarus to allow  
foreign components.


Mattias