How to embed video into your source code

In this post, I will be showing how to embed publicly hosted video into your Delphi source code. I’ll be using YouTube as an example hosting provider, but in practice, Viddler is probably a better choice because of its embedded comments feature and corporate support.

 

 

What to do

1. Locate your CodeInsight directory. Eg. “C:Program FilesEmbarcaderoRAD Studio7.0ObjReposen” .
2. Backup your original HelpInsight.xsl file.
3. Open this file in an editor and locate the node <xsl:template match=”summary”>
4. After the close of this node, insert the following node

<xsl:template match="youtube">
	<iframe width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" controls="0">
	  <xsl:attribute name="src">http://www.youtube.com/embed/<xsl:value-of select="@id"/></xsl:attribute>
	</iframe>
</xsl:template>

1. Locate the <xsl:apply-templates select=”member/summary”/> node. Just after that one insert:

   <xsl:apply-templates select="member/youtube">

2. Save and close HelpInsight.xsl file.
3. Open up Delphi. Just before the class or declarative element that you which to annotate, insert something like this …

   {$REGION 'xmldoc'}
   type
   ///  <summary>Play this video!</summary>
   ///  <youtube id="PWNLPl7oIRc"/>
   {$ENDREGION}

   Replace the id code with the YouTube id of your annotating video. The Summary node is completely optional. The “Type” inside the folded region is important – I’ll explain that in a moment.

4. Close the folded region.
5. Mouse over your target class or declarative element. Give it a second, and Alakhazam! Embedded Video!

So what’s with the extraneous “type” inside the folded region?

Delphi’s Help Insight feature has a surprising anomaly (read “bug”). If you have two or more type declarations in a unit, Help Insight only works on the first declarative element after the “type” keyword. Where normally, a developer would tend to write:

type
 TMyFirstType = banana banana banana;
 TMySecondType = banana banana banana;

To get Help Insight to work on both declarations, we have to write it like this:

type
{$REGION 'xmldoc'}
/// <summary>This is about TMyFirstType. It involves a lot of bananas.</summary>
{$ENDREGION}
 TMyFirstType = banana banana banana;
{$REGION 'xmldoc'}
type
/// <summary>This is about TSecondFirstType.</summary>
{$ENDREGION}
 TMySecondType = banana banana banana;

The funny thing is, that if you choose Viddler over YouTube and you embed some comments in your video, what is presented to the client-developer is text comments embedded in video embedded in XML embedded in source code.