Why should I care about RTTI in Delphi?

Question

I've heard a lot about the new/improved RTTI capabilities of Delphi 2010, but I must admit my ignorance...I don't understand it. I know every version of Delphi has supported RTTI...and I know that RTTI (Runtime Type Information) allows me to access type information while my application is running.

But what exactly does that mean? Is Delphi 2010's RTTI support the same thing as reflection in .NET?

Could someone please explain why RTTI is useful? Pretend I'm your pointy haired boss and help me understand why RTTI is cool. How might I use it in a real-world application?

Answer 1

RTTI in Delphi is still not quite as full-featured as Reflection in .NET or other managed languages, because it is operating on compiled code, not an Intermediate Language (bytecode). However, it is a very similar concept, and the new RTTI system in Delphi 2010 brings it a lot closer to reflection, exposing an entire object-oriented API.

Pre-D2010, the RTTI was pretty limited. About the only thing I ever remember doing with it was converting an enumerated type to a string (or vice versa) for use in drop-down lists. I may have used it at one point for control persistence.

With the new RTTI in D2010 you can do a lot more things:

• XML Serialization

• Attribute-based metadata (TCustomAttribute). Typical use cases would be automatic validation of properties and automated permission checks, two things that you normally have to write a lot of code for.

• Adding Active Scripting support (i.e. using the Windows script control)

• Building a plug-in system; you could do this before, but there were a lot of headaches. I wasn't able to find a really good example of someone doing this from top to bottom, but all of the necessary functions are available now.

• It looks like someone's even trying to implement Spring (DI framework) for Delphi 2010.

So it's definitely very useful, although I'm not sure how well you'd be able to explain it to a PHB; most of its usefulness is probably going to be realized through 3rd-party libraries and frameworks, much the same way it works in the .NET community today - it's rare to see reflection code sitting in the business logic, but a typical app will make use of several reflection-based components like an Object-Relational Mapper or IoC Container.

Have I answered the question?

Answer 2

Most people probably won't use it in a real world application.

The people who will use it are the framework builders. Frameworks such as DUnit make extensive use of RTTI.

With the new RTTI capabilities we should expect to start seeing more advanced frameworks and tools appearing, similar to what is available for .NET. These frameworks will revolutionise your development moreso than RTTI will on it's own.

Answer 3

D2010's extended RTTI is a lot like C#'s reflection. It gives you the ability to get at any field of an object, or inspect its methods. This has all sorts of potential uses. For example, if you can read any field of an object, you can write serialization code that can work with any object. And the ability to inspect methods and obtain their name and signature makes a class much easier to register with a scripting engine.

To me, that's the primary advantage of extended RTTI: The ability to write code that works with any class by examining its members, instead of writing different versions of the same code over and over, tailored to each individual class.

Answer 4

RTTI in Delphi has always been important since version 1.0. Classic RTTI features include the "published" properties section of Classes, which allowed the Object Inspector and the component designtime features to work. For my purposes, I would often use Published class properties to allow for enumeration of those properties at runtime. To store things from my objects to disk, for persistence.

The Delphi 2010 RTTI extends this classic RTTI massively, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking Delphi did not even have RTTI until delphi 2010.

I would say the #1 most useful applications of "The New RTTI" are (as several other answers already state) going to be in Frameworks written by the gurus, that:

1. Handle persistence to files or databases. Database and configuration or document saving/loading frameworks and components would use this under the hood.

2. Handle pickling/marshalling/encoding/decoding to and from various over-the-wire formats, like JSON, XML, EDI, and other things.

3. Unit testing was mentioned by someone else (JUnit), but I think perhaps the same frameworks could be really handy for debug and error reporting tools. Given an object passed as a parameter, on the stack, why not have bug reports that can dump all the data that was passed along to a function that failed, and not just a list of functions?

As you can see, some creative people are likely to think of even more uses for this. You could say, that though it does not bring parity to .NET reflection (which another answer speaks more about), it does bring a lot of "dynamic language" features (Think of Perl, Python, JavaScript) to an otherwise strongly typed static-type systems world of Delphi.

Answer 5

For me, personally, extended RTTI gave a possibility to retrieve calling convention from the method pointer. However, currently, that code is under conditional directive, because i am not satisfied with it.

(Critics and suggestions on workarond with basic RTTI are welcome, tho)

Answer 6

Look for TMS Aurelius and you will see that RTTI Attributes are very useful in terms of creating an ORM DataBase Framework and XML Serialization into pure objects and the opposite too.

Answer 7

You are supposed to care because they put it on the box. Clearly they think that some people will care.

Whether you actually have a use for it is entirely dependent on the nature of your projects. Since you didn't have it before and don't understand why having it now is a benefit, this would suggest to me that you don't have a use for it. It's then up to you whether to spend the time researching the subject further in order to discover whether you might be able to find a use for it.

Whether that is the most productive use of your time in relation to your projects, again is something only you can know.