Geoff,

> > Do you (and Jason) think that a property setting to
> > automatically propagate assignments from Fields to
> > BufferFields (or propagate by default those that make
> > much sense, like OnGetText/OnSetText) could be a
> > thing to consider?
>
> What I would prefer (and we have briefly discussed some time ago) is
> that we isolate some aspects of TIB_Column out to a new TIB_ColumnDef
> class - so that information common to all instances is available at a
> common point.

Yes, perhaps even at design time! We could make it have all the pros of
persistent fields without the quirks and shortcomings. Setting an event
property at design time would merely have the function of reminding the
component to do an assignment at run time, after prepare.
A much less invasive thing than persistent fields. I think it would be
much useful; while IBO does not require the programmer to write many
event handlers as other technologies do, it is still useful to have the
object inspector write down the skeletons for you and the component do
the right assignments.

> This could be implemented without impact to exist apps by using
> get/set functions on the currently exposed properties.
>
> Not sure if/when this could come into being. I make it sound easy,
> but I think there could be considerable work involved.

I don't know the code base enough to have a qualified opinion on this,
but as I see it it doesn't sound terribly complex.

> (My biggest reservation is that it starts to look too much like the
> VCL ;-)

...which is not as bad as they say after all.
Mine is that working at design time would (almost) require the use of
collections, whereas Jason seems to favour IB_StringLists.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando