Geoff,

> 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.

This sounds like something that would definitely help me reach my current
pending milestone for the 4.x branch.

I will take a look at your efforts once you send them over to me.

> 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.

Very good to know!

> 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).]

This sounds very useful, but it would also be a very significant
undertaking.

> 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.

I do have test suites but they are heavily integrated into my development
environment. Likely they would be difficult to uproot and transplant in
another environment. What we ought to do is get me up to speed with what you
are doing and see how much can be merged for an official 4.10 release. I
will take care of the bulk of the testing so that you can focus on helping
me in this area that I find a bit daunting. Your assistance here will be a
great catalyst to help me get some solid traction and hit the milestone of
proper characterset support for the 4.x IBO code base so that I can turn my
focus to IBO 5.x more fully.

PS. I am finally back into a mode that I can productively develop. I have
been quiet here because my main workstation went face down a couple weeks
ago and would not get through BIOS POST phase. Turns out I got lucky in that
is all it took was a $5.50 replacement BIOS chip to get it back upright. Got
it installed recently and now I am back in the saddle.

Thanks,
Jason Wharton