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The GUI for my company's main product was written in Delphi in the late '90's, and has been updated to Delphi 2007. I'm working with a group to update the Delphi 2007 to XE4.

We still use a number of components from ADL VCL (similar to DevExpress, but now defunct), but have not installed the entire package. Rather, we have the files we need located in a folder seperate from our project folder, and have the path to these files specified in: Tools-Options-Library-browsing path and Project-Options-search path

When I open main, I get the error: "TADLAboutBox not found. Ignore the error and continue?"

The unit "ADLAbout" that defines "ADLAboutBox" is declared in the uses clause in main. Moreover, our project compiles just fine.

How can I get rid of these messages? What might be wrong?

Thanks very much for your advice.

Például
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2 Answers2

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The component is not installed in the IDE, so when you open a form that uses that component you get an error.

But the source to the component can be found so when you compile it will do that without problems.

To get rid of the error you must install the component in the IDE.

Birger
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ADL VCL is not available for XE4, since it was discontinued some time before XE4 was released. If you have the ADL source code, and have ported it to XE4, then it's plausible that you may have some success.

The error message you describe is symptomatic of not having the design-time packages for the components installed. You'll need to build and install design-time packages for any components that you want to interact with at design-time.

David Heffernan
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  • Thanks for your help! We have the source code and it's working fine, just the ide is complaining. I will look into creating a separate package with just the files we need. It seems that we never had ADL VCL installed as a package in the 2007 environment. It seems the old ide should have been complaining about this. Can you think of any reason why it does not? Thanks again. Your help is greatly appreciated. – Például Jul 29 '13 at 15:59
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    The old IDE will complain if none of the active design time packages register the component. So I guess that you did have the component registered in a package. – David Heffernan Jul 29 '13 at 16:04
  • It seems that Delphi developers feel strongly about dividing packages into run-time and design-time. I've put the few components that we still need from AdlVcl into a package that is both run-time and design-time and installed it into the IDE and things seem to be working fine. If our company does not want to build with run-time packages and we are including the AdlVcl code into our .exe already, is there anything wrong with making a package this way just so as to get rid of the IDE complaints? – Például Jan 16 '14 at 17:08
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    As I understand it, there are licensing issues. Designtime functionality is implemented in code that you are not allowed to redistribute. So long as you don't redistribute your package I believe that you are fine. – David Heffernan Jan 16 '14 at 17:19