Question

I’ve downloaded embtvstools (Embarcadero TVirtualShellTools) from: http://embtvstools.svn.sourceforge.net/

However when I create a new package, drop the .pas files (and a missing compilers.inc from VirtualTreeView in) and compile the lot, I get an error E2026, why is this and how do I avoid/workaround this?

resourcestring
    sAssociationChanged = 'Association Changed';
    sItemCreate = 'Item Create';
    sItemDelete = 'Item Delete';
    ....

const
  // Literal translations of TShellNotifyEvent type.  Useful when using the
  // OnShellNotify event to print out what event occurred.  VirtualShellUtilities.pas
  // has a helper function ShellNotifyEventToStr that uses these.
  VET_NOTIFY_EVENTS: array[0..19] of WideString = (
    sAssociationChanged,
    sAttributes,
    sItemCreate,
    .....

[Pascal Error] IDEVirtualResources.pas(155): E2026 Constant expression expected
[Pascal Error] IDEVirtualResources.pas(156): E2026 Constant expression expected
[Pascal Error] IDEVirtualResources.pas(157): E2026 Constant expression expected

Update
Changing the widestring to a string stops the compiler complaining, (I suspect it will create some issue elsewhere because widestring <> string) I would like to keep the constant of type widestring.

Answer 1

As Uwe points out in the comments, resourcestring in Unicode versions of Delphi is of type WideString. But you are using pre-Unicode Delphi and so resourcestring is simply AnsiString. This explains the compilation error.

How to proceed depends on what you are attempting to do. If you intend to translate these strings into different languages then you may be in a bind. If you are intending to do that then you would obviously be far better off with a Unicode version of Delphi.

So, since you are sticking with a pre-Unicode Delphi I guess you don’t actually need to translate the strings. In which case just change the declaration of the const array from WideString to string. As it happens, this array is declared by this code but never once referred to.