The not so good news

• FlexCel 5 will need Delphi XE or newer. This was a very difficult decision, as we know a lot of you people are still in Delphi 7. We have our download stats that give us a nice outlook on how many people is in each version, and while Delphi 7 is certainly going down, it still is big.
  
  But we really had no choice. As you might know, FlexCel 5 for VCL is based in FlexCel for .NET codebase, and the .NET codebase makes heavy use of things like generics, class variables, records with methods, nullable types, hashtables, class constructors, and let"s not forget real Unicode support and Unicode conversion functions. There are also many bugs that have been fixed in newer versions, and that would have to be workarounded to support older versions.
  
  In our first tries at creating FlexCel for VCL we tried to workaround all of those somehow: A record with a method can be converted to a helper function on that record, a generic type can be auto generated with a tool. We could search for unicode support methods somewhere, or write our own. But well, somewhere along the way we realized that we will never be able to get this working at all if we had to first code our own Delphi XE on top of Delphi 7 in order to code FlexCel on top of that. FlexCel on its own is over half million lines of code, getting that to work was enough work.
  
  We needed the Delphi 2009 feature list at least. Problem is, generics support in D2009 and 2010 is so buggy, that it gets impossible to compile FlexCel with them. XE and XE2 aren"t perfect either, but the bugs are not too serious and can be workarounded.
  
  But also we are trying to look a little into the future. Embarcadero is releasing about a version per year, and that means in some months we will be seeing XE3, and a year after XE4, and soon we will be supporting also a lot of versions in FlexCel 5. We need to test, profile, workaround bugs in every version that we support, and at the rate new Delphis keep coming, we can"t keep forever supporting Delphi 5.
  
  What we do plan to do once we launch FlexCel 5 and if demand for older Delphi keeps strong, it is to provide a dll compiled with XE2 that can be used from any Delphi version, or any other programing tool. We understand it is not the best way, but it is better than deploying Excel, and we think it is a reasonable compromise.
  
  
• FlexCel 5 is not 100% compatible with FlexCel 3. Personally I am a big fan of backwards compatibility, even if today it seems a little out of fashion and everybody seems to advocate killing it. As a FlexCel user myself, I don"t appreciate having older apps breaking because of a change in FlexCel. But FlexCel for VCL was getting old, with many design decisions going back to its first version in 1996, and there will never be a better time to modernize it than now. I did learn a couple of things since 1996, or I want to believe I did. What things were confusing, too complex, or just could be done better.
  
  I did apply many of those things when creating FlexCel.NET (as I had no backwards compatibility to care about), and I am very happy on how it turned out. In fact, I liked it so much that this is what FlexCel for VCL will look like. On the API side it doesn"t mean much, some methods renamed (for example "CellValue" property is now a pair of Get/SetCellValue methods, because indexed properties bring a lot of trouble for C++ Builder). But all in all it should be very simple to convert the code, as there isn"t any change for the sake of change, and most things remain the same. I have myself converted the examples with minimal work. On the report side changes are more complex, and even when I plan to ship a semi automatic converter, things don"t map that well. But I really believe it is worth it, the new reporting engine is just so much better.
  
  On the bright side, we will be shipping a TXLSXAdapter that you can use with FlexCel 3 components, and that uses FlexCel 5 inside, and so it provides xlsx and xls support for FlexCel 3. You will be able to keep using the old FlexCel 3 in parallel with FlexCel 5, and convert the complex reports as you need.
  
  

The good news

What"s in the preview

Finally

Query1.Sql.Text := "SELECT I.ID AS INVOICE_ID, I.INVOICE_TYPE, I.INVOICE_NO, I.ISSUE_DATE, I.PRINT_DATE, " +
  "C.ID AS CUSTOMER_ID, C.CUSTOMER_NAME, C.SEX, C.BIRTHDAY, N.ID AS COUNTRY_ID, N.COUNTRY_NAME" +
  "FROM INVOICE AS I INNER JOIN CUSTOMER AS C ON (C.ID = I.CUSTOMER_ID) " +
  "LEFT JOIN COUNTRY AS N ON (N.ID = C.COUNTRY_ID)" +
  "WHERE I.ID = :INVOICE_ID;"
Query1.ParamByName("INVOICE_ID").AsInteger := 1;
Query1.Open;
ShowMessage(Format("Invoice No: %d, Customer: %s, Country: %s",
  [Query1.FieldByName("INVOICE_NO").AsInteger,
  Query1.FieldByName("CUSTOMER_NAME").AsString,
  Query1.FieldByName("COUNTRY_NAME").AsString]));  

Invoice := Manager1.Find<TInvoice>(1);
ShowMessage(Format("Invoice No: %d, Customer: %s, Country: %s",
  [Invoice.InvoiceNo, Invoice.Customer.Name, Invoice.Customer.Country.Name]));