Is it possible to make descendant of a TService and publish my own properties?

Question

After making a few various services in Delphi, I've realized that the TService is lacking some of the necessary things which should come with a service application, such as logging, exception handling, and the 'Description' property in the registry.

I was wondering if it's possible for me to make my own service shell such as TJDService which is inherited from a TService but with some additional things, such as a 'Description' property showing in the object inspector. Can I make my own service shell like this? I know I can make my own "default project" inheriting from a TService but that includes all my code with any new project.

When a new service is created, it should look like this:

unit Unit1;

interface

uses
  Winapi.Windows, Winapi.Messages, System.SysUtils, System.Classes, Vcl.SvcMgr,
  JDServices;

type
  TJDService1 = class(TJDService)
  private

  public
    function GetServiceController: TServiceController; override;
  end;

var
  JDService1: TJDService1;

implementation

{$R *.DFM}

procedure ServiceController(CtrlCode: DWord); stdcall;
begin
  JDService1.Controller(CtrlCode);
end;

function TJDService1.GetServiceController: TServiceController;
begin
  Result := ServiceController;
end;

end.

Same as a typical service, but using my TJDService instead of just TService.

Answer 1

Simple question with a simple answer. Yes you can do this. I do exactly this myself to share code between the various services that are implemented in my company's codebase.

RegisterCustomModule is the way to make your Description property show up in the Object Inspector. Having said that, I don't find the ability to set these service properties in the Object Inspector to be all that valuable. I would regard it perfectly acceptable to set them at runtime in code, but that decision is down to personal preference.

Even if you use RegisterCustomModule to make your service class known to the IDE, the default new service application will not use your service class. You can customise the default service application to your needs and then save it to the Object Repository.

My answer here shows how I implement an app that can be run as either a service or as a standard desktop process for debugging purposes.

Answer 2

Yes you can and below link on how to do it

http://www.marcocantu.com/ddh/ddh15/ddh15e.htm

Answer 3

If you don't want to have to do the work yourself SvCom offers a nice set of tools for creating services in Delphi that provide far more than what's available out of the box.

Answer 4

I'm going to be a rebel here, but the easiest way to do this is make your own copy of SvcMgr and make the changes there. As long as you only make changes that are accessed at run-time, build and run with your own local copy of SvcMgr. I do this to change the basic exception handling and application logging that come with a service and you can download my copy of SvcMgr.pas from my web site.

This won't work if you need design-time changes, but pretty much everything you do at design-time you can do at run-time anyway. There are better solutions, but none faster and easier.