Installing tiOPF2 in Delphi

What is tiOPF?

As their web site sais: The TechInsite Object Persistence Framework (tiOPF) is an Open Source framework of Delphi code that simplifies the mapping of an object oriented business model into a relational database. The framework is mature and robust. It has been in use on production sites for over five years. It is free, open source, and available for immediate download with full source code. tiOPF comes with about 32 persistence-aware visual components that you can use. There has been some work that would allow making any VCL component persistence aware. I must say that at first, I thought that being limited to components provided by tiOPF2 might be an issue, but after seeing them, I believe they will fulfill most of my needs.

Finding the Source code.

The latest version on their web site is 1.41, but you can find the 2.0 version in their subversion repository that's located at http://tiopf.techinsite.com.au/svn/. As I've read in the newsgroups, the 2.0 version has been used in production for about 1 year and it's considered stable.

What to get?

To get you started, you need to get everything from the Trunk (you might skip the UnitTests and the InstallScripts folders.

How to install?

In the Compilers folder, you'll find folders for the Delphi 6 to Delphi 2006 editions. Open the tiOPFCore.dpk, tiOPFGUI.dpk and tiOPFGUIDsgn.dpk packages and compile them. Install the last package, as it's a design-time package. You might encounter some error about madExcept_ package missing. Just remove the entries from the uses list and recompile. The madExcept package is an interesting one, but I didn't have time, yet, to check it out so I just deleted the entries.

Adding folders to search path

Now you need to add the tiOPF files to Borland's compiler search path. Go to Tools -> Environment Options, and add the following folders to the Library path:

• tiOPF2\Trunk\Compilers\Delphi???\ _Dcu - replace ??? with your Delphi version.
• tiOPF2\Trunk\GUI
• tiOPF2\Trunk\Core
• tiOPF2\Trunk\Options

That's about it.