Global Application Settings

• Dec 11, 2024
• 3 minutes to read

This section contains information on all application-wide appearance and behavior settings available for DevExpress components and forms.

Appearance Settings

The DevExpress Skin Engine is a convenient tool that allows you to maintain the visual consistency of your application. To apply a built-in or custom skin and switch between color schemes available for vector skins, you can use the TdxSkinController component, which provides access to DevExpress Skin Engine functionality.

Refer to the following topic for detailed information on appearance customization options available for DevExpress-powered applications: Appearance Settings.

Project Settings

Project Settings is a design-time dialog where you can configure all project settings related to DevExpress components. To open the dialog, navigate to the Project menu category of your RAD Studio IDE and click DevExpress Settings for ProjectName.

Refer to the following topic for detailed information: Project Settings.

Diacritic Marks and Related String Comparison Settings

A diacritic mark is a glyph added to a base letter. The majority of European languages uses diacritic marks to stress vowels and designate different sounds for the same base letter in an alphabet.

DevExpress data controllers and text field-based editors treat a base letter with different diacritic marks as different characters for all comparison operations that allow you to search, sort, and filter data. You can set the TdxDiacriticStringOptions.ComparisonMode class property to TdxDiacriticStringComparisonMode.Insensitive in the initialization section of the main application to treat all variations of the same letter in an alphabet as the same character for string comparison.

Code Example: Configure Diacritic Settings

The following code example configures global diacritic mark-related settings at application startup:

Delphi

uses
  dxCore;
// ...
begin
  TdxDiacriticStringOptions.ComparisonMode := TdxDiacriticStringComparisonMode.Insensitive;
  TdxDiacriticStringOptions.NormalizationMode := TdxDiacriticStringNormalizationMode.System;
  // ...
  Application.Initialize;
  Application.MainFormOnTaskBar := True;
  Application.CreateForm(TMyForm, MyForm);
  Application.Run;
end.

C++

#include <vcl.h>
#include "dxCore.hpp"
#pragma hdrstop
#include <tchar.h>
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
USEFORM("Unit1.cpp", TMyForm);
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
int WINAPI _tWinMain(HINSTANCE, HINSTANCE, LPTSTR, int)
{
  try
  {
    TdxDiacriticStringOptions::ComparisonMode = TdxDiacriticStringComparisonMode::Insensitive;
    TdxDiacriticStringOptions::NormalizationMode = TdxDiacriticStringNormalizationMode::System;
    // ...
    Application->Initialize();
    Application->MainFormOnTaskBar = true;
    Application->CreateForm(__classid(TMyForm), &MyForm);
    Application->Run();
  }
  // ...
}

Refer to the TdxDiacriticStringOptions class description for detailed information on all available options.

Right-to-Left Layout

Certain languages, such as Hebrew or Arabic, use a right-to-left (RTL) writing system that requires a mirrored UI layout and a reversed text direction.

Enable RTL Layout

To use RTL display mode in an application or control, assign bdRightToLeft to the application’s BiDiMode property or the control’s BiDiMode property.

Refer to the following topic for a list of supported controls and a code example: Right-to-Left Layout.

Multi-Threaded Calculations

DevExpress data controllers that manage data in container controls rely on multi-threaded algorithms for data sort, filter, and group operations. These multi-threaded algorithms significantly speed up (up to two or more times faster) all data shaping operations.

Refer to the following topic for detailed information: Multi-Threaded Algorithms.