TECH TIP: Enabling a ReportBuilder feature in Delphi Design-time

Question: “How do I add <some feature> to the Report Designer at Delphi designtime?”

Answer: ReportBuilder offers an open architecture which allows for considerable extensibility. Many of the features in RAP and DADE, as well as our output devices are available within your applications by simply adding a unit name to your uses clause. If you’ve looked at our source code, you’ve seen that those units often have calls in their Initialization and Finalization sections which will register various classes with the ReportBuilder environment. Thus, in an application, when those units are loaded, the registration code fires. In order to get this to happen in Delphi, at designtime, you must emulate that behavior.  In order to do that, you must add these units to a designtime package and add that package to the Delphi IDE. This will cause the Initialization and Finalization code of your units to fire.