From Zarko Gajic,
Your Guide to Delphi Programming.
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Welcome to the fourth chapter of the free Delphi Database Course. So far, this course has provided enough information to help you connect to an Access database and to display data coming from a database table. In the last chapter we were discussing some *advanced* database programming techniques - let's now go back to more *for beginners* topics.

This time, you will learn how to build a form (the real one) which can be used to browse through the records of a database table. All the examples presented in the previous chapters have used several data-aware (ADOTable, DBGrid, ...) components without going into detail what each component is designed for, and how all the components link together.

Working together

When developing (ADO-based) Delphi database applications, the components on the Data Controls page, the dbGo page, and the Data Access page of the component palette enable our application to read from and write information to databases.

Every data-aware Delphi form, in general, will host:

• Several data-aware controls (Data Controls tab) used to create the visual user interface (the look of the data form).
• At least one DataSource component (Data Access tab) which represents an interface between a dataset component and data-aware controls on a form.
• One or more dataset components providing access to the data residing in a database table or query.
• A connection component pointing all the dataset components to a specific data store.