Lazarus 5.0 release notes

Lazarus 5.0 is not yet released. This page is under construction!

LCL Changes

TToolBar

• Added property "Menu: TMainMenu"

Display the contents of a main menu on the Toolbar

TColorDialog

• Added TColorDialogOptions for non-Windows widgetsets.
• New property AlphaChannel (for widgetsets that supoort this)

TTreeView

• Custom-painting was refactored to provide more flexibility. The so-far ignored painting stages tvsPreErase and tvsPostErase were activated for the OnAdvancedCustomDrawItem event. See TTreeView#Painting_of_the_TreeView
• The HideSelection property has been changed to behave like in Delphi.
  • Old behaviour: The property was ignored. An unfocused treeview did show the selection even when HideSelection=true.
  • New behaviour: Now the selection of an unfocused tree is really hidden when HideSelection=true.
  • A "compatibility" property HideSelectionMode was introduced to switch between old and new behaviour. However, this property was marked as deprecated and will be removed in v5.99.
• Functionality to save/load a TTreeView's Items to/from an xml file (or stream) are added in the newly added TreeStorage unit.

IDE Changes

• Find/rename identifier dialog:
  • added option Find overrides too to find all overrides of a method and their references.
  • now supports ampersands, e.g. &type
  • can now rename units and programs
  • supports dotted unit names, e.g. rename Tools to My.Utils and vice versa.
• File Save as now updates all references even dotted unitnames.

Source Editor

• Added support for word-wrap
• Additional Syntax highlighting for Pascal
  • Nested Brackets
  • Params and types in function headers; Names and Types in var/const/type declarations
  • Custom words. (Specify Identifiers, keyword or symbols) https://wiki.freepascal.org/IDE_Window:_Editor_Options_HighlightColors#Custom_Words
  • Colors for TODO, DONE, NOTE comments (if TodoListLaz package is installed)

Components

SynEdit

• Word-wrap can now be used with Folding. (some config in code required)

TAChart

• New series type, TStateSeries, for displaying the state of machines etc. Also usable for a simple Gantt chart.

Changes affecting compatibility

LazControls incompatibility

TTreeFilterEdit

• The "Item" property of class TTreeFilterBranch has been changed
  • Old: property Items: TStringList
  • New: property Items: TStrings

TTreeFilterBranch = class
  public
    property Items: TStrings ...;

• • TStringList exposed properties that - if changed - would have affected the correct operations of TTreeFilterBranch.
  • If any code relied on properties not present in TStrings, then it should use a TStringlist of its own, and assign the results, once completely prepared.
  • It is not possible to cast the "Items" property as "TStringList(FilterBranch.Items)". The underlying implementation does not use a Stringlist. Such a type-cast will crash.

SynEdit

Highlighters (Fold-Hl / TSynCustomHighlighterRange)

TSynCustomFoldHighlighter used to store the range objects in TSynCustomHighlighterRanges using an AvlTree. It now uses TLazHighlighterRangesDictionary using TDictionary.

As a result any range derived from TSynCustomHighlighterRange must now support returning a hash (see TLazHighlighterRangeForDictionary).

See also: https://wiki.freepascal.org/SynEdit_Highlighter#Objects_as_Ranges_-_Incompatible_change_in_4.99