Merlin's Delphi Forge

You may want to allow users to send you back feedback. You can either send it directly to your site via sockets or send the user to your website. What if you don’t have a website? No feedback? Yeah, right. Just have them send it to you by e-mail.

You can not send spaces in URLs, you have to convert them first. Example: if the subject were to be ‘Bug Report!’ then you should put %20 instead of the space character – ‘Bug%20Report!’. %20 is the ASCII value for space.

In this example MemoBugText is the memo in which the user describes the bug, ‘bugreports@youremail.com’ is your e-mail address and ‘Bug Report’ is the subject of that e-mail.

Code block

uses
  ShellAPI, Windows;

Code block

// For more information on ShellExecute() check out our tip
// "How to run programs and execute documents, mailto links and URLs" in the Windows category
ShellExecute(0, 'open', PChar('mailto:bugreports@youremail.com?subject=Bug%20Report&Body=' + MemoBugText.Text), nil, nil, SW_SHOWNORMAL);

You shouldn’t have too much problem opening a Delphi 4 form in Delphi 2 but you won’t have luck opening a 32 bit or C++ Builder form in Delphi 1. The only way is to save the file in text form. Delphi 5 can do this automatically but in all the previous versions you have to do this all by yourself, form by form.
This is a full featured program that will do all the work for you. The source is dumped into Public Domain.

(* DfmToTxt 1.0
**
** Author: Jacob Dybala (m3Rlin). Public Domain
**   <m3rlin@programmer.net>
**
** Created : January 2 2000
** Modified: April 12 2000
*)
program DfmToTxt; 

{$apptype console} { Generate console application }
{$debuginfo off}
{$localsymbols off}
{$optimizations on}
{$rangechecks off} 

uses
  Classes, SysUtils; 

var
  sNewFileName: string;
  strInput, strOutput: TStream;
begin
  { Initialize streams }
  strInput := nil;
  strOutput := nil; 

  { Get commandline parameters }
  if (ParamCount > 2) or (ParamCount = 0) then begin
    WriteLn('DfmToTxt 1.0');
    WriteLn('By Jacob Dybala (m3Rlin). Public Domain.');
    WriteLn;
    WriteLn('Usage: DfmToTxt <input /> <output></output>');
    Exit;
  end else if not FileExists(ParamStr(1)) then begin
    WriteLn(Format('Error: %s can not be found.', [sNewFileName]));
    Exit;
  end if ExtractFileExt(ParamStr(1) <> '.dfm') then begin
    WriteLn('Error: Input file must be a .dfm (Delphi Form) file');
    Exit;
end; 

if ParamCount = 1 then begin
  sNewFileName := ParamStr(1);
  sNewFileName := ChangeFileExt(sNewFileName, '.txt');
end else begin
  sNewFileName := ParamStr(2);
  if FileExists(sNewFileName) then begin
    WriteLn(Format('Error: A file named %s already exists.', [sNewFileName]));
    Exit;
  end;
end; 

{ Main code }
try
  try
    strInput := TFileStream.Create(ParamStr(1), fmOpenRead);
    strOutput := TFileStream.Create(sNewFileName, fmCreate);
  expect
    Write('Error: Failed creating ');
    WriteLn(sNewFileName);
    Exit;
  end;
  ObjectResourceToText(strInput, strOutput);
  finally
    strInput.Free;
    strOutput.Free;
  end;
end;