[fpc-devel] new resource support question

[Giulio Bernardi]

Il 26/12/2009 20:43, Paul Ishenin ha scritto:
> Giulio Bernardi wrote:
>> I have no fpc available at the moment. However, you can build yourself
>> the fcl-res documentation (run makehtml.sh) in xml directory, inside
>> fcl-res
>> directory. There are examples for groupiconresource too.
> Yes, examples are about creating an icon resource from an ico file.
>> In general, if you need to use resources at runtime you should check
>> Microsoft
>> documentation about resources. If you need to manipulate resources
>> (e.g. read
>> a .ico file in a series of resources, or the other way around) use
>> fcl-res.
> Can't find how to do this other way around using fcl-res. I have a
> resource handle and need an ico stream. At moment I implemented this
> myself in Lazarus but I would like to switch to fcl-res code if it is
> available (to reduce code duplication).
>
fcl-res is not meant to work with resources at runtime: it is a framework
designed to be used by resource compilers or developer tools (e.g. Lazarus
could use it to directly generate .res files, instead writing .rc files and
relying on windres, that AFAIK is also not endian-safe and produces garbage
on big endian machines).
I think it could be possible to write a "runtime reader" that doesn't
read resources from a file but uses LoadResource and friends. However maybe
this could bloat lcl and slow things down.

I quickly looked at commit 23290. A couple of things: use makeintresource
instead of doing pchar(resid), since this might change in the future, and
pay attention to the endianess: all data structures are little endian.

Now, I have some doubts: rebuilding an .ico stream seems an overkill to me.
I've not been using GUI stuff like lazarus or delphi since some times, so
I might be wrong in the following lines.
Isn't TIcon supposed to contain a single icon, and not a whole set of icons
as defined in a .ico file or in a RT_GROUP_ICON resource?
This is because googling I found some example code that does things like this:

icon.handle:=LoadIcon(hInstance,'MYICON');

Now, LoadIcon (or LoadImage) loads a single icon from the set (it loads the 
"best" icon).
Looking at MS documentation about LoadImage, it seems that things work like
this: with loadimage you specify a desired size for the icon, and the system
tries to load the icon with that size. If you don't specify it, it will load
the best one according to system metrics (so probably loadicon calls loadimage
in this way), or the first one if you don't use LR_DEFAULTSIZE flag.

I suppose that TIcon.LoadFromStream loads the first icon in the .ico stream.
Can you confirm it?

Now, what does delphi do with LoadFromResourceName and LoadFromResourceID?
Because I think that instead of calling LoadFromStream, the thing to do would
be self.handle := LoadImage(blah blah blah);
This could be accomplished in lazarus by writing a LoadImage function that
scans the RT_GROUP_ICON resource to find the desired icon, and then returns
the handle of the desired RT_ICON, which can be loaded as a bitmap (plus the
mask) or as a PNG (from vista onwards afaik).
Note: I think windows returns an HICON, I don't know if it's the same thing
of an RT_ICON handle or not.
Another possibility is that LoadFromStream doesn't work with RT_(GROUP_)ICONs
but it expects a standard .ico/.bmp/.png/whatever stream instead (e.g. stored
as RT_RCDATA) but it seems a bit strange to me.

I looked at those methods' documentation on embarcadero website but it's not
so clear.

Giulio