Drawing Flow Charts in Delphi

Question

what should i look for to start writing a software to design flow charts in delphi? is there any example out there? any library or code sample?

thanks;

Answer 1

I know DevExpress has a flowchart library. I've used it and it works pretty well. It's not free, though.

Answer 2

TMS has some nice chart components: http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/advchart.asp

Answer 3

I asked about drawing and sizing shapes at run time a while ago. Some of the answers might be useful for you.

Answer 4

Take a look at the source code for StarUML. Its a complete working implimentation of a diagramming tool and it integrates directly into the IDE. Granted, it's UML diagrams, not flowcharts but you should be able to glean a lot of ideas from it. The project has since transitioned to Java but still has the original Delphi code as a downloadable zip file.

If you intend to create a commercial product keep in mind that it is licensed under the GPL.

Answer 5

Depending on what your time constraints are, its really not that difficult to create this yourself using the drawing methods in TCanvas. (or for the more adventurous, using GDI/GDI+/Direct2D directly).

The benefit of doing this is that you are not then dependent on the 3rd party component, can make it do exactly what you want, and not have to make your app fit the component's way of thinking. Plus, there's no licensing issuses, since you wrote it.

The downside, of course, is that you need to to it all yourself.

The key to a drawing app like a flow charter is actually storing the data. Each shape should be an instance of an object that has several methods such as draw(). Different shapes should have diffeerent decendent classes, each with their own overloaded draw() method to draw that shape. Shapes can be stored in a TList or similar container. To draw the document, iterate the list of objects and call its draw method.