This extension of Delphi's string property editor has been designed to get round two limitations of the standard property editor:
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You can't enter multi-line strings with embedded CR/LF characters via the object inspector. Such strings can only be assigned at run-time.
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Although Delphi strings have a 2Gb size limit, the standard property editor only accepts strings up to 255 characters long. Once again, longer strings must be assigned at run-time.
The enhanced property editor works with string and TCaption properties. It adds an ellipsis button to the right hand side of the data entry area in the object inspector. Clicking this button displays a dialogue box in which the property's value can be entered. Pressing Return in the dialogue box starts a new line. There is no practical limit to the length of strings that can be entered.
Clicking OK (or pressing Ctrl+Return) causes the entered text to be assigned to the property. If, or how, any newline characters will be displayed in the object inspector depends on the version of Delphi being used, but they will be retained.
The edit dialogue is resizable. Word wrapping can be switched on or off. Both the word-wrapping and dialogue box size and position are persistent. The dialogue box has a toolbar that provides buttons to:
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Select all the text in the editor.
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Clear all the text from the editor.
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Overwrite the editor's existing text with text from the clipboard.
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Copy all the text from the editor to the clipboard.
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Undo the last edit.
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Load text into the editor from a file.
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Save the contents of the editor to a file.
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Display online help.
In addition the normal cut, copy and paste operations are available via a context menu and the usual keywboard shortcuts.
Screen shots
Our first screen shot is of the extended string editor dialogue box, called from Delphi 2010, displaying a two line string.
The second screen shot shows the object inspector displaying a multi-line string in a label's caption. This caption has been entered using the Extended String Property Editor The ellipsis button displays the editor when clicked.
As can be seen above we are editing a TLabel. The final screenshot shows the label on a form at design time, displaying the two lines of text.
