These are mostly Delphi 2 .pas,.dfm and .dpr files so you can inspect and tweak. Read the source before using it. My standard is to put curly comments straight after the first line of the procedure body to explain what it does. If there are any text files in the zip files then please read them also.

I use many of these these daily. There are some bits that just suit me fine for reasons too boring to go into and some legacy bits I daren't consign to the bit bucket. If you want to develop them to suit yourself then go ahead. If you find a bug then send me the fix.

There is no charge, no support and no liability accepted.

It can also be used with many common controls on a form as a bonus.

A really cool effect is to use the exact desktop wallpaper so that the form looks like it is made of a clear plastic overlay.

Clear plastic effect	Realistic 3 dimensional effect	20 bitmaps included, roll your own

The zip file contains a couple of example projects and source code. One of the examples shows how to move and resize a form which doesn't have borders.

• Printing functions including change paper trays (NOT NT!), wrapping and aligning text, quickly setting font and selecting printer.
• Encapsulation of database reads that trap null fields and allow the use of "T/F/Y/N" in single character fields as boolean. (So you can SQL on them) I never read a dataset field any other way. It avoids silly invalid variant conversion errors on nulls and doesn't care about different sorts of number field.
• Message boxes of various sorts
• Useful string functions: Substitution, chopping, and formatting oddities
• Miscelaneous file routines and some visual control bits
• A new date type which allows invalid dates such as Not-a-valid date, Beginning-of-time, 3rd July (ie no year) and so on. This has been designed to work very simply as a three character string and is ideal for database work.
• Various date routines including checking, enhancing an editbox and converting into the correct format for SQL queries
• This changes frequently (as I add goodies and walk slap into bugs) so be warned that although most of the code is stable there might be bits that are new or bits that you use in a different way to me and give odd results.

An important feature is that it can load and save itself to file efficiently. See MiniIni

But it provides support for a hierarchical key naming scheme imagine a simpler form of registry in the file of your choice.

Suppose we had a file like this

user.1.name=James T Kirk user.1.password=wecomeinpeace user.2.name=Mr Spock user.2.password=illogical server.mailin= ; incoming mail servers server.mailin.1.ip=123.123.123.123 server.mailin.1.userID=enterprise server.mailin.1.password=stardate

• .countkey('server.mailout') --> 0 "does key exist?"
• .countkey('user') --> 4 "raw count of how many lines start with this key"
• .countSubKeys('user')-->2 "No of distinct sub-keys"
• .listSubKeys('user') --> '1|2' string of keys split by vertical bar
• .subTree('user') --> string list of everything starting with 'user' with user key stripped off

For example to create a daily, weekly and monthly backup a single call with parameters of [1,7,31] would do the trick. This is sometimes called the Tower of Hanoi method and is useful when you want to have frequent copies of fresh data but only a few copies of ancient data.

• Blurb is under the programmers control with sensible box resizing.
• Optional help button
• Yes/No button captions can be adapted to suit with buttons enlarged to suit
• OK box is plain white while the alert box flashes yellow/white. (I reserve alerts for out of the ordinary events which may mean a support call. OK serves for "operation completed" and "operation failed")
• Plug-in replacements for inputbox and inputquery
• Inputs extended with validation for strings (including pick from a list), integer,float and date with variations such as Positive-integer or Date-in-past.

• Pick one accepts first selection
• Pick some waits for user to OK zero or more selected items
• Check all normally only returns when all are ticked

In the configuration you specify the bitmaps (it doesn't scale bitmaps but it will sort out different bitmaps for different printers) texts and other rectangular areas (in which you'll be putting something later under program control). By creating the letterhead object you'll select the printer and be ready to print the complete letterhead or programatically select the elements to print. After that you've got access to the text areas which you might use for printing addresses into window envelopes and the dimensions of the space you've left for printing the actual content.

This is a recent addition so may get changed and ahem, bugs fixed