Question

I have foreign object instance and i want to examine properties of the component “manually”.
I know about component streaming and how to convert output to text format, but problem is – TCustomActionList (as i figured out my instance is TActionManager) wont stream its actions. Is there any trick to have it to do so?

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UPD: Now doing that by creating TDataModule (as container/owner), iterating thru Actions and creating TAction instances and doing Assign. Solution still suffers from not caring about TAction descendants tho.

Answer 1

Simple example that doesn’t do anything tricky.

function  TMyThing.SaveComponent(a:TComponent):String;
var
  Stream2: TStringStream;
  Stream1: TMemoryStream;
begin
  Stream1 := TMemoryStream.Create;
  Stream2 := TStringStream.Create;
  try
    Stream1.WriteComponent(a);
    Stream1.position := 0;
    ObjectBinaryToText(Stream1, Stream2);
    result := Stream2.DataString;
  finally
    Stream1.Free;
    Stream2.Free;
  end;
end;

procedure TMyThing.Dump;
var
 n:Integer;
 a:TContainedAction;
 s:String;
begin
  for n := 0 to ActionManager1.ActionCount-1 do begin
      a := ActionManager1.Actions[n];
      s := '----- '+a.Category+' '+a.Name+' '+a.ClassName+':';
      // crude manual way
      if a is TAction then begin
          s := s+ ' '+TAction(a).Caption;
          s := s+ ' '+TAction(a).Hint;

      end;
      // RTTI stream in DFM text format
      s := s+ SaveComponent(a);
      Memo1.Lines.Add(s);
  end;
end;