Creating Chat Application with Borland Delphi/Indy: The Client

First, let’s build the UI. Again, this is just a guide; please build the interface in any way you like. Fire up Delphi, create a new application, and drop an idtcpclient component. Rename it ‘tc’, and put 3 edits, 4 buttons,4 statictext, a listbox and a memo on the form. To create a menu on the form, you can use a mainmenu component. I’ve used a actionmainmenubar and action manager, because it gives an overall XP look. Now, double click on actionmanager or the mainmenu component (whichever one you’ve choosen), create a menu item called Configure, and add sub menu items, Connection Settings and Exit.  Arrange them to your liking. This is what my UI looks like so far:

Add 3 more forms and call the associated units: sendfile, showpic and setup.

On the form that you will use to send a file add the following components:

• edit rename to ‘edfn’
  
• 2 statictext, 
  
• 2 buttons -- rename one of the buttons to btSendfile, 
  
• progressbar -- rename to 'prog'
  
• an opendialogbox -- rename to 'op'
  
• a combobox -- rename to 'cb.'                      

This is what my send file form looks like so far:

This is how you send a file

On the form that you will use to view screenshot add the following component:

Image – Available from the Additional Components Tab

On the setup form add the following components:

• 2 edit renamed edport and edip respectively
  
• 2 static text
  
• 1 button renamed btSetup