Recently I worked on a project with many forms and database components, where I had to change the references in the components itself.

The problem I had was to find and edit all the components which had a special keyword / reference in it!

I tried to look for those keywords with the normal Delphi search but it doesn’t include the  form documents which made it very difficult to locate the pages, which needed to be changed. But opening all the documents and check every database component would have been too time consuming!

Help with this problem came from the tool / IDE extension, GExperts (http://www.gexperts.org/). It offers in its page “Grep Search” the additional search option: “Search form files” which allows the extended search over form pages!

I hope I will find this feature in one of the next Delphi releases!

2 Responses

  1. Not only does GExperts let you search over muliple files (inculding DFM’s) you can do a gobal search and replace! We don’t need Embarcadero to add this feature, we have it with GExperts… let them spend their time on things we don’t have and need!

  2. You could use windows search 4 which is used in vista, 7 and can be installed in XP. You will need to explain it that pas and dfm-files are “Plain text”. And then point it to locations which it should index. I usualy index whole drive D. After some time you will be able to find any pice of code on your computer almost instantly.