After working for close to 3 weeks (since 27 Nov), I'm very close to completing a set of Delphi VCL components that can store and retrieve their values from any persistent storage.
What's slowing down the progress now is designing a set of property editors and custom designers for the components for both the Delphi 7 (and perhaps Delphi 2005) IDE. Of course, I'm not redesigning the wheel, but deriving much of the functionality of the new VCL components from the existing VCL components.
While I've looked around for existing designers, it appears to me that there is none.
The persistence components allow their values to be saved into and retrieved from a persistent storage. These components will include derivatives of ComboBox, Edit, Memo, CheckBox, among others.
Would anyone be interested in integrating these persistence components into their projects when they're ready? If so, please let me know.
In 2017, with the release of Delphi 10.2 Tokyo, Embarcadero introduced a specialized implementation of the Observer pattern into the System.Classes unit. While it has been in the wild for 9 years, it remains a "hidden" architecture for many, primarily because it serves as the invisible engine behind LiveBindings. Other than live bindings, you can also use the Observer pattern as a way to update component settings to the Windows registry, an .ini file, or persist it elsewhere.
System.Classes