Delphi for .NET Developer’s Guide

Pre-populating List Controls

Two of the controls on the download request form are DropDownList controls to allow the user to select his country and state/province. Obviously, we’ll need to populate these controls. The method by which this is currently done is to read these values from a file containing name/value pairs. So, for instance, a states.txt file contains data such as

AL=Alabama
AK=Alaska
AB=Alberta
AS=American Samoa
AZ=Arizona
AR=Arkansas
BC=British Columbia
CA=California
CO=Colorado

Likewise, a file, countries.txt, contains similar data but with countries. Listing 26.2 is a function that reads these files and populates the DropDownList that is passed as a parameter with the contents of the file whose name is also passed as a parameter. ...