How can I search for Delphi documentation? [closed]

Question

It can be hard to find Delphi documentation using web search. Often the documentation is buried far from the top of the list of hits. For instance a Google search for delphi setlength yields this result:

The first hit that points to the official Embarcadero documentation is in 8th place, the bottom of the list as shown above. But it's a link to the documentation for Delphi 2009. Ideally I would like to find documentation for the latest version.

Answer 1

You can navigate to the front page of the Embarcadero documentation and search from there. The link is: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/Main_Page

Note that no version is included in the link. If you navigate to that link then the site will re-direct you to a version specific URL for the latest release. In this case, as I write this today, you would be re-directed to: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE5/en/Main_Page

If you wish to search documentation for a specific version, then you can supply that version in the URL.

You can type the search term into the search box at the top-left of the page, as shown in this screen capture:

However, the results are disappointing. Here they are:

Gah! Where's the documentation for the SetLength function?

Better results are obtained if you use the Libraries section of the documentation as your portal. That is found here: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/Main_Page

Navigate there are search for SetLength and the results are:

And this is exactly what we are looking for.

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Sometimes I still start with a web search because in my experience a good web search engine can produce more relevant results. So, using Google as an example, you might try these search terms:

• site:docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE5 SetLength
• site:docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries SetLength
• site:docwiki.embarcadero.com SetLength

As a short cut you can usually get away with typing your search term and adding docwiki and delphi. That's usually enough to persuade the search engine to only return Embarcadero hits. So you might search for: docwiki delphi SetLength and get this result:

One final point. If you find yourself writing an answer here on Stack Overflow, and want to link to the documentation, you can also use the trick of removing the version from the URL. Such a URL gets re-directed to the latest version. So, continuing with SetLength, you might replace:

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE5/en/System.SetLength

with

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.SetLength

Using this approach could make your answer more future-proof.