Thanks for the comment. So far I have tried a mix of using inheritance, and include files. I found because of 2) in my previous comment that inheritance didn’t work as well as using include files. Child lists are also problematic. Fortunately, 2) can be resolved, so I will likely adopt the approach you’ve suggested.

I have put in a QC report (87746) that might alleviate the IDE problems with Include files. Please vote for it if you think it’s a good solution.

I considered include files, but they don’t play well in Delphi; all kinds of IDE support that does not work, or does not work well (recompile on changed include files, refactoring across include files, etc).

–jeroen

1) If your object contains children such as child lists that need to be bound at design-time, then you must create abstract versions of those lists. The descendant object must create concrete child list instances and then cast all references to be able to call descendant methods. This is very ugly, although doable.

2) The ObjectRegistry has no concept of inheritance. If you register a design-time class, say TClientAbstract and at run-time attempt to use a concrete descendant TClient, the framework will complain that TClient has not been registered. You need to register both classes even though they have the same metadata.

property Description :ThcAttribute Index 7 read GetAttribute;

Then another include file for the implementation section containing the Register class procedure and the calls to register and unregister the class in the initialization and finalization sections respectively.