Hi Jason,

I've spent my spare time over the last two weeks or so working
on building a unicode version of IBObjects v4.8.7 (also
integrating fixes from the 4.9.9 version, also integrating my
own column attributes optimisation that we discussed a year or
two ago, also removing any attempt to support any versions of
Delphi prior to v6... and may cut more). Calling it v4.10.

I consider the work experimental... wanted to see how long it
would take to make a significant dent in the problem given my
experience converting the (non-IBO-aware part of the) Enh
components to unicode in the weeks previous.

One of the experimental bits of this process is that I have
tried to bring across some ideas from my C++ unicode work...
where we can actually convert text (and text blob) fields from
whatever character-set they are provided in (Utf8, Win1251 etc)
over to unicode. [If I get this to work it allows a connection
of character-set NONE to return native types and so support
mixed character sets in a database... and this can be quite
useful for various reasons (off-load transliteration from the
server, support fast ASCII fields for number/date fields stored
as text etc etc).]

The result of my conversion I expect/hope to be useful over the
unicode BMP (basic multilingual plane)... I don't really expect
it to be entirely suitable for character-sets with code-points
outside the BMP. I am hopeful it should still be functional in
such situations... for example I believe my MaskEnh code would
work in such situations but would require masks written to take
code-point pair situations into account - not ideal but not
entirely broken either.


To the point...

I have gotten to the point where I can build the "core" package
of IBObjects with no warnings from Delphi v2010. I have written
some tests for the base code but having gotten the TIB_Dataset
compiled there is so much to test that writing a test suite is
a major job on it's own.

Do you have a test suite that I could run to see what parts of
the code I have broken? It could really help speed up getting
the code to a useable state if you did.

TIA

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing