The TStreamList class for Borland Delphi provides the functionality of storing and managing multiple streams in a single file. It also provides a "table of contents" listing of the multi-stream file contents that is compatible with the Items property of graphical components such as TListBox and TOutline so you can easily populate user-interface controls in your applications and impose a logical structure on your multi-stream file.
Data integrity checking is optionally implemented using a cyclical redundancy check on streams as they are stored to and read from the multi-stream file, and a three-character field is available for you to specify some identification of the stream content type for convenient programmatic interpretation, such as launching an appropriate editor or viewer for different stored stream types.
A detailed help file and example implementation are included.
This could be used to deploy as a single, organized file, a number application-related files that you don't want to compile into your application nor have to deploy the BDE or some other fat-ware database engine in order to programmatically access these files from a database. For instance, these files might be the report definition files from QuickReports or Crystal Reports, or maybe some custom forms you display and print with something like Adobe Acrobat, or they could be images, or sound, or whatever.
The source code for the Multi-Stream Manager application is available so you can study the implementation details. This application allows you to import and export files to/from multi-stream files, and arrange a hierarchical-structured table-of-contents describing the individual stored streams. If you just want to start using it as a document repository right now rather than look at the source code, a free, unrestricted compiled EXE is available for download, too!
