We continue to publish support articles for students as part of the Academy's educational programme. Every developer at some point will need to work with business graphics: diagrams, charts, barcodes. And our FastReport VCL will help them do it! Creation of charts and graphs To draw a diagram the ...

In the previous article about working with charts and graphs, we were already familiar with business graphics and barcodes. Now it is time to complicate the task and work with different data sources. Most reports are typically based on data from databases. To access this data Lazarus provides powerf...

As part of the Academic's educational programme, we have decided to produce some support articles for students. If you are making business or government software that needs to be cross-platform or just run on Linux systems or native operating systems (which are also Linux), you will eventually need...

"Drill Down" or "deepening into data" is a concept with many sides, which can refer to actions in tables or in something else that encapsulates information. And plain and simple, it's a drop-down list! One of the most important operations is Drill-Down, for example, in OLAP with cubes, and, in prin...

How to make a mush of data into an informative report? Oracle DB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, FireBird are probably the most popular, but by no means all, of the many DBMSs in which data can be created, populated, modified and managed. Often they are filled with this very data for...

Recently we've released FastReport FMX 2.8 which includes support of FMXLinux framework. In this article I'd like to describe installation process and requirements based on trial version of FastReport FMX 2.8, Embarcadero RAD Studio 10.4.1, FmxLinux 1.52 from GetIT package manager and Ubuntu 20.04....

Until recently, the task of generating reports through the Web from an application written in Lazarus was, let’s say, very creative. Today we are pleased to announce the release of client-server components for Lazarus in beta testing. They can be used to create and customise a server for remot...

What is a ZPL file? ZPL stands for Zebra Programming Language. It allows team to create the desired print design for any label or page. This makes the label independent from the specific printing device. The printer receives commands to produce shapes, frames, symbols and other things, and itsel...

Someone might not know, but the PDF standard allows you to create fillable forms. That is, the finished document can be edited directly from the viewer. This is most often used for questionnaires and various forms. The user fills in the fields and sends the document by email or prints it. Today we ...

A bit of theory about barcodes It is difficult to imagine our life without barcodes, especially now that we meet them at every step. We go to the cinema and our tickets contain this “black and white drawing of bars”, we go to the supermarket and each product has information about it in ...

CODE 39 is the barcode developed by Intermec Corporation in 1975. Up to 43 characters including numbers, letters and some symbols can be included in the barcode: 0123456789 ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRSTUVWXYZ-.$/+%. Since letters can be handled, CODE 39 is indispensable in the industrial fields and used in...

I would like to note that FastReport VCL is one of the most convenient components for generating reports of any complexity. After all, here we can use not only different types of DBMS, but also Swiss barcodes, maps, tables, graphs and many other objects. Quite often we are asked “how to create...

ShapeFile, also known as Shape is a figure or a set of complex shape figures (probably, unrelated). A Shape field can be one of the following types of geometry: point, polyline or polygon. It is also notable that together with a *.shp file, *.dbf file is formed and it contains the header informatio...

BMP, JPEG, TIFF, GIF – there is a variety of raster image formats. 1. BMP First of all, you should know that since BMP is an old image format it is not so popular among Internet users, only the bitmap images are saved in this format which doesn’t support the vector ones. The size of ....

The SVG file is a two-dimensional vector image based on documents in XML format. The SVG format is used not only for the description of two-dimensional vector graphics, but also for mixed vector-raster images. Let's list the main advantages of SVG format: First of all, as previously mentioned ...

The ODT file extension is used for Open Document text files, which are usually created using the OpenOffice or LibreOffice word processor apps. This document format is based on the XML markup language and therefore easy to convert. To understand what kind of format it is, it’s enough to see t...

It is often necessary to combine several documents into one (for example, PDF). It could be several chapters of documentation, catalog directories etc. Strictly speaking, this sometimes needs to be done not only for PDF, it’s just that this file format itself does not imply editing and “...

Summary of ODS and ODF ODS is an open format for spreadsheets made in accordance with the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard. This format is distributed free of charge and uses the standards of the International Organization for Standardization. The standard was developed by OASIS technical committ...

“How to save in the HTML file format from Delphi?”, “how to create an HTML 5 file from Delphi?”, “how to create the HTML 5 file from Lazarus?” – these questions often arise among the developers. The HTML document is written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTM...

The Delphi programming language, or Turbo Pascal, has become a starting point for many developers. Thanks to the simple and clear syntax and the ability to write in a procedural style, it turned out to be very easy to learn. Many would compare it with Visual Basic, but at the peak of its popularity ...