<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  »No topics above this level« Overview

LMD NG ConnectionPack is a part of Next Generation (NG) package suite. All these packages are based on new IDE and language features of latest Delphi IDE versions.

 

NG ConnectionPack provides the ability to access to Web based services (REST services), such as cloud storage services. The following services are currently supported:

 

 

The first thing required to connect REST services is to register your application. This is usually done by creating an account in the developer's zone of the corresponding service provider web site, and then filling the application description data, such as the Name, Logo, and some other parameters. As a result you'll get application's ClientID and Secret codes. Provided ClientID and Secret values should be copied into corresponding properties of the NG-ConnectionPack components. More precisely the registration process is described in Application Registration section.

 

After you've got your ClientID and Secret codes NG-ConnectionPack components will be able to connect to the corresponding REST services. However, application's end-users are also required to authenticate themselves in the corresponding services. This process is called authentication, and performed using modal dialog, where the corresponding REST service login page is shown to the user along with your registered application name, logo and required access rights. After successful user login, the service provides so called access_token (and some other info), which is used subsequently to sign Http requests.

 

Its important to note that returned authentication info can be stored and loaded using SaveState and LoadState methods, and its strongly recommended to use there methods to persist authentication info between your application runs. First, this will prevent the user from logging in each time your application run. Second, for some services there is an explicit limit of tokens, which can be returned, and thus the requirement of storing authentication info between application runs are stated explicitly in the service's documentation.

 

NG-ConnectionPack shows authentication dialog as required on demand; there no way to show login dialog explicitly, but you can always check that the authentication info is Ok, using RefreshAccess public method. Look at Authentication section for further description.

 

After successful user authentication, real features of the services become available to the application. Here its important to note that NG-ConnectionPack components implements state-less wrappers for corresponding REST services. Components do not store internally any returned data, such as file objects or calendar events. On each request new set of objects will be returned. Most of such objects are really implemented as Delphi records (thanks to Delphi new language features, which allow the records to have properties and methods); so, the memory management is mostly automatic. Look at State-less and Memory Management section for more info.

 

Components

 

NG-ConnectionPack include the following components, accessible from the Delphi's component palette at design-time:

 

 

Features

 

Following is a short feature list of NG-Connection package: