Converting a Delphi application to run as a service - is it necessary?

Question

I have a delphi app that logs data from various places and writes the data to a file. The app has quite an extensive GUI to allow display of the data, configuration of the

Answer 1

I usually create my application in such a way that it can be started as a service or as a GUI, via a commandline switch /GUI.

When the application runs with a GUI, I instantiate and start the service class "manually".

Advantages:

• It'll run the same code, making it very easy to debug the service. You can just put breakpoints and step through your code without having to "attach" to a running application.

• Because of the GUI, you can see what your service would be doing, and interact with it, via listviews and buttons, even on remote servers where you don't have a debugger. Having to interact with your service via logs and configurations is crappy and slow.

Example dpr, from a project that works like this:

program xxxx;

uses 
  SysUtils,
  SvcMgr,
  .......;

{$R *.res}

begin
  GlobalAppId := 1;
  MapMatcherController := TMapMatcherController.Create(nil);
  try
    if FindCmdLineSwitch('GUI',['/','-'],True) then
    begin
      Forms.Application.Initialize;
      Forms.Application.MainFormOnTaskbar := True;
      Forms.Application.CreateForm(TfrmMain, frmMain);
      Forms.Application.Run;
    end
    else
    begin
      SvcMgr.Application.Initialize;
      SvcMgr.Application.CreateForm(TsrvMapMatcher2, srvMapMatcher2);
      SvcMgr.Application.Run;
    end;
  finally
    MapMatcherController.Free;
 end;
end.

Oh, another thing to keep in mind is that services usually run as a "system" user, which means you'll have different privileges and settings (for example drive letter mappings).