[fpc-devel] RTTI and Attributes in Delphi 2010

[listmember]

  On 2009-08-17 01:20, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> An exact example would be very helpful. And the old "property mapping 
> to database field" doesn't could, because that's a design preference 
> and such mappings are not always appropriate or possible.
What I have in mind isn't quite an example but I'd like to voice a need 
I felt a many times over the years and attributes seem to fulfill it.

Some of these attributes would include 'help', 'copyright' and things 
like that.

I would use the attributes to display help for any property in the 
property editor in design time.

I.e. instead of having to read a help file, by pressing a button next to 
that property I'd see a popup explaining it.

The information provided in these 'help's could also be extracted to 
generate a help file too.

Same thing for 'copyright', of course, and similar to 'help' it would 
apply to the class as well as properties and code.

I'd like these to be keywords and similar XML (or like Pascal's 
'begin..end') they would also have a closing tag/keyword; so that, for 
example, 'help_begin' would have 'help_end' as its closing tag/keyword.

Other attributes could be references to external systems such as 
databases. i.e. field mappings to databases.

While I would like these to be both designtime and runtime, with 
appropriate compiler swithces we could strip them out of final executable.