Using TeeBI without programming

Using TeeBI

The low-level classes and features explained above, are used in "high-level" mode by several design-time components, user interface dialogs, and the "BIWeb" server.

This allows non-code working with all TeeBI features, inside the ide at design-time, or at runtime in your own applications, or using the BIWeb server configuration dialogs.

Important concepts

Stores

A "Store" represents a location, a place, where you have data that has been already persisted to disk files using the BI.Persist unit classes.

Data can be saved to disk as in the first example of this document (creating the data by hand and then saving it to a disk file), or it can also be imported automatically from several sources and formats, and saved to disk.

To enable all user interfaces and design-time components to locate data (in high-level mode), its necessary to previously configure a machine with at least a defined "Store".

Under Windows, this is simply a registry entry that is automatically generated using the "Store Manager" editor dialog:

Here we have several stores, with the "local" store selected as "Default".

A "store" can point to a disk folder in the same machine or network, or it can point to a www web address.

When using a web address, the Store expects a BIWeb server running at that site.

A store can also be defined to point to a web "localhost" server (a BIWeb running on the same machine).

Stores information are saved to Windows registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Steema Software\TeeBI\Store

Or to a simple *.ini file for other systems (Mac OSX, iOS, Android).

The BI.Persist unit includes classes to manage stores by code (TStore and TStores classes). The TStore class can also be used to obtain (load) data from a Store into memory:

var D : TDataItem;
D:= TStore.Load( 'SQLite_demo' );   // <-- from the "default" store

or:

D:= TStore.Load( 'Hong Kong', 'SQLite_demo' );   // <-- from a specific "Hong Kong" store

When using a TStore to load data, it will automatically try first to locate the data in the global memory cache.

If it's not there yet, it will appropriately load it from a disk file or from a web http server, transparently.

Data loaded via TStore does not need to be released explicitly (D.Free or D.DisposeOf), as it will be destroyed when the application finishes or the memory cache needs more memory.

Data Manager

The Data Manager dialog allows adding data to a Store.

Each data has a name that corresponds to the string parameter of TStore.Load method.

TBIDataSet

A BIDataSet is like a normal TDataSet component, with a "Data" property that can be assigned at design-time or runtime:

BIDataSet1.Data := Orders;
BIDataSet1.Open;

When setting Data at design-time, the "origin" Store of the data (a disk file or web server address) will be persisted together with the dataset into the .dfm or .fmx form, for later reload.

BIDataSet has also a public "Cursor" property of type TDataCursor, enabling sorting and filtering, and a "Summary" property of type TSummary to provide query capabilities.

When linking a BIDataSet to a BIGrid or BIChart (through a standard TDataSource component), the grid and chart will detect and make use of the BIDataSet cursor features, for example to sort grid columns clicking them at the headers.

BIDataSet can then be used as a normal (read-only by default) DataSet:

DataSource1.Dataset := BIDataSet1;
DBGrid1.DataSource := DataSource1;