At the end of my last blog post I had my data access code in separate assemblies compiling inside Delphi Prism but the web application was still in a Delphi 2007 project. So the final step would be to get this project running in Delphi Prism.

I had 2 immediate problems, one was Delphi Prism currently only supports website mode as opposed to Delphi 2007 which supported web application mode. The second problem was that Delphi Prism seems to expect the codebehind files to be the same name as the web file but with .pas at the end.

For example the codebehind for Default.aspx is Default.aspx.pas

This was a problem for me because I have been using multiple level namespaces. For example if I had a webapplication called webapplication1 and a folder called folder1 with a aspx called default.aspx the filename/namespace would be webapplication1.folder1.default.pas

Broken down into steps my conversion process was the following:-

1) Open the existing solution and add the web application project directory as a website.

2) Rename my codebehind files to match the name of the webfile ( problem 2)

 

3) Add public partial partial to all codebehind classes 

type

  TWebForm1 = class(System.Web.UI.Page)

  {$REGION 'Designer Managed Code'}

becomes

  TWebForm1 = public partial class(System.Web.UI.Page)

 

4) Modifying the page tag in the aspx. For 2, changing codebehind to codefile and the language to Oxygene

<%@ Page language="c#" Debug="true" Codebehind="WebForm1.pas" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="WebForm1.TWebForm1" %>

becomes 

 

<%@ Page language="Oxygene" Debug="true" Codefile="WebForm1.aspx.pas" AutoEventWireup="true" Inherits="WebForm1.TWebForm1" %>

 

5) server control declarations are no longer required in the codebehind file so they can be removed.

 

6) InitializeComponent and OnInit are no longer reqired. I didn't remove those but instead commented them out. They are

required later. 

 

7) Webservices, services and handlers need their codebehind moved to

the app_code directory under the root of the 

This is an example of how the webservice tag needs to be changed .

<%@ WebService Language="Oxygene" Debug="true" Codebehind="~/App_Code/BookMarksWS.pas" Class="BookMarksWS.TBookMarksWS" %> 

8) I threw away my original global.asax file with its codebehind and copied existing code into new Global.asax looking like this

 <%@ Application Language="Oxygene" %>

<script runat="server">

  method Application_Start(sender: Object; e: EventArgs);

  begin

  end;

  method Application_End(sender: Object; e: EventArgs);

  begin

  end;

  method Application_Error(sender: Object; e: EventArgs);

  begin

  end;

  method Session_Start(sender: Object; e: EventArgs);

  begin

  end;

  method Session_End(sender: Object; e: EventArgs);

  begin

  end;

</script>

 

9) Using the commented out initializecomponents and on_init methods I modified the aspx files and added the eventhandlers. For example click 

Include(Self.SaveButton.Click, Self.SaveButton_Click) in intializecomponents

becomes 

<asp:Button id="SaveButton" runat="server" width="38px" OnClick="SaveButton_Click" text="Save"></asp:Button> in the aspx

 

10) The final step was get the project to compile. Some of the problems I found have been covered in the previous blog post. One thing I will note is that I couldn't find any way of turning on compatibility mode, so I had to make additional changes such as removing named constructors and using new rather than create.

 

The whole process for a project with twenty or so aspx files took several hours. I was pleasantly surprised. 

One thing I think is worth mentioning is that I have been using the "model view presenter" pattern, in particular the objectcontainerdatasource control to separate my business logic from presentation. This resulted in alot less code in the codebehind files, and so speeded up the process.