Delphi 7.1 and persistent fields

The following is a post to the borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup from Mark Edington, a senior engineer on the Delphi development team:

Sorry about the delay in commenting here. My newsreader was giving me fits
trying to post yesterday and I've been running around like a headless
chicken dealing with this issue.

Clearly many folks (and I'll put myself at the top of the list),
underestimated the ramifications of the change that was made to to enforce
the size matching. I was a little hesitent at the time I made the change,
but I really had no idea how common it it is for folks to have this
situation in their applications.

As it stands, the fix is not helping anyone because it has adversely
affected so many applications (and clearly that was not the intention of the
change), so the arguments about whether or not the DB code should enforce
the size matching are somewhat moot. We don't want to be introducing
changes in a patch (or even a point release) that have this effect. Period.

The original TClientDataset defect that prompted the change (QC#3874) can
and will be fixed in a different way.

We are are urgently working on a remedy for this situation and I will be
posting more information regarding that as soon as it is available.

For folks who installed the patch and are affected by this it is my
recomendation that you simply revert the related files from the original
Delphi 7 CD. There are only a handful of fixes in those files anyway. I'll
outline what to copy from the CD below.

By way of defense for the change, I would point out that the size checking
code introduced is actually a slightly more relaxed version of the checking
that was done in Delphi 4 and prior releases. So it's not something
completely new. On the other hand, it is certainly valid for the size of a
persistent field to be larger than the size of the underlying field in the
case where the data is read-only and at the very least that provision should
have been coded in as well. In any case, it is my opinion that the "fix"
should be completely removed and the code restored to the way it was in
Delphi 7.0.

Finally, I would like to offer my most sincere apology to you and the other
folks who were impacted by this issue.

Mark

I couldn't have stated it better myself. I was involved with a rather lengthy meeting regarding this very issue and can certainly attest to the fact that we are working as quickly as possible to get a resolution delivered as soon as possible. Please bear with us while we try and shift gears...