[Lazarus] Getting help for a type if its unit is not in uses

Sven Barth pascaldragon at googlemail.com
Wed Feb 5 09:03:32 CET 2014


Hello together!

On the German Delphi-Forum Delphi-PRAXiS there was the question in which 
unit the type TObjectList resided in Lazarus. Besides the obvious answer 
"contnrs" there was also the suggestion to use F1 on the TObjectList 
identifier to let the help find it for you. (For those that can read 
German, here is the thread: 
http://www.delphipraxis.net/178892-lazarus-kennt-keine-tobjectlist.html )

Now the problem is that this won't work in Lazarus which will return a 
error message "Hilfeschlüsselwort "FPCKeyword_TObjectList" nciht[sic!] 
gefunden." ("Help keyword "FPCKeyword_TObjectList" not found") [plus 
another, in my opinion needless, error message afterwards with (in my 
case) "No help found for "project1.lpr" at (13,16)"] and the user is 
none the wiser... This is at least the case in 1.0.12 on win64, I didn't 
check for any changes here in 1.2/1.3...

Are there any ideas for improving this situation for people that know 
that there is an identifier in the RTL, FCL, whatever, but don't know 
which unit it resides in? E.g. Lazarus did scan the FPC sources, 
couldn't it keep an identifier->unit index? Also could the error message 
be improved a bit? E.g. kick out that second error and use "TObjectList" 
instead of "FPCKeyword_TObjectList" in the error message?

Regards,
Sven



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