Usage for LiveBinding

Question

I don't understand LiveBinding's purpose. I would like to know which are the cases in which LiveBinding is most valuable. Embarcadero's manual describes it: "LiveBindings is a data-binding feature supported by both the VCL and FireMonkey frameworks in RAD Studio. LiveBindings is an expression-based framework, which means it uses binding expressions to bind objects to other objects or to dataset fields".
Thanks but I still don't know more than before.

I have seen some video in which a guy spends 12 minutes and hundredths of clicks to connect the caption of a TLabel to a TListBox control. When the user clicks an item in ListBox the name of the item is shown in Label. I could have done that with a single line of code (few keystrokes and no mouse clicks). I am not criticizing LiveBinding. I am saying that I don't understand where it is helpful. I am missing something. Since it is not doing something that cannot be done from code, it means it's doing something that can be done from code, but visually and much much faster. I admit I haven't invested a lot of time in this topic but everywhere I look I see a terribly convoluted way (come on, you really need 5 extra controls to make LiveBinding works?) to do a simple task.

Also, it seems that LiveBinding was mostly designed for DB. All examples will include some kind of DB connectivity. But I am expressly interested only about the cases where I can use LiveBindings and there is no data set/DB involved. I am not using DB that much.

Answer 1

I doubt v. much that anyone would use live bindings if they could use traditional db-aware VCL components. However, that's not an option for non-VCL projects (Android, Apple, etc) and live bindings is the only Emba-supplied option for delivering data to those from TDataSet descendants.

An advantage of live bindings is that in addition to the Android and Apple targets, you can use them in Windows apps, so conceivably you could write the same (FMX-based) application for all three.

Libe-binding can also be used in VCL applications, but tbh, I can't imagine why anyone would use live bindings if they were only targeting a Windows DB application, as they are much slower than the traditional db-aware controls, especially multi-row ones such as grids.

I have not tried myself, but because the implementation of live bindings is interface-based, its potential use extends far beyond DB applications, but you would have to implement the interfaces yourself. It seems to be based around a fairly abstract expression-evaluation engine.

Setting up a l.b. project in the IDE does seem to require quite a bit more clicking around than you'd be used to from a traditional VCL app, but that's mostly because there is an additional step involved where you tell the IDE how to bind the gui objects to the data source(s). However, it is quite straightforward to "wire up" live bindings entirely in code if you want to.