Using HTML files at build time

WEB WEB Feature Requests
1

Hi - this is a feature that I’ve suggested in the past but has now become crucial for me now that I’m using LLMs to generate code. My general use case is as follows:

  1. All my projects use direct forms, which I create at runtime.
  2. Each form has only one component - a TWebHTMLDiv.
  3. I either design each form in VS Code, or most of the time, get an LLM to generate it in VS Code.
  4. For convenience, each HTML file has a wrapper div with the same id as the TWebHTMLDiv on the form.
  5. I copy the HTML that’s within the wrapper div from VS Code to the TWebHTMLDiv.HTML property.

As you can imagine this is a maintenance nightmare, and it also means I can’t make full use of AI since I have a manual copy step.

I want to be able to get the LLM to generate the HTML for my forms and then use the command line compiler (not the IDE) to build the project and run the tests.

My current plan is to use the TWebHTMLDiv.HTML property to store a file name and build a pre-processing console app that copies the dfm file out to a temp directory, gets the file name and then injects the HTML into the original dfm before calling the command-line compiler (finally restoring the original dfm file after the build). However I think it would be very useful to have a capability like this out of the box.

Thanks, Bob

2

I’m trying to understand.
Is all this not coming from the fact you use direct forms? Non direct-forms have the accompanying HTML file that the TWebForm takes care of to load the HTML?
Is there a specific reason to use direct forms then in this case (assuming you deploy the app on a real web server?)

3

Hi Bruno - funnily enough after posting this I was mulling over trying it with standard forms - I suppose I’ve been a bit fixated on using direct forms. I’ll do some experiments and get back.

Cheers, Bob