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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Wayback Machine search string for either docwiki, Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009 docs

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/07/21

A long time ago, I wrote about Google Search string for either docwiki, Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009 docs.

Well, not long after Embarcadero totally messed up their DocWiki installation, ditched all DocWiki history cand causing a multi-day DocWiki outage (see The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.), they also killed their (then still working) Docs server (containing all the Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009 documentation).

That means the search strings in my previous blog post mentioned above do not work any more. The only way to find back that kind of documentation is through old blog posts (those usually are in the various Web Search Engine indexes), or through the Wayback Machine.

What Embarcadero also did not do is cooperate with the people at the Internet Archive to ensure the docs server was completely archived in the Wayback Machine. Since about Delphi 2010, their behaviour has been ticking boxes in the product feature matrices instead of tickling their users with great user experience including understanding what ensuring history is available actually means.

For the Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero QC (Quality Central) debacle (those were anonymously accessible, but Quality Portal is not), I did that the hard work to get most entries archived in the Wayback Machine after scraping the content and putting it in a gist¹. As a one person entity, I cannot continue that effort, especially not with limited energy after my cancer treatments.

Developer Relations knew about the effort, and did not act on it for the documentation. That feels like a big middle finger to me.

The Wayback Machine does not offer much search options, but a little bit of search is better than no search, and what is archived cannot be messed up by Embarcadero in a new outage any more.

Here are the links:

Why all these links you ask?

  • Like I mentioned above, Embarcadero only ticks boxes so not all documentation pages made it into the Wayback Machine.
  • Some of the categories have more than 10-thousand results, so subdividing them is easier for getting results at all.
  • Japanese has less than 10-thousand results and can be used to find back results for other languages (usually, replacing JA with EN, FR or GE works).
  • Some of these links contain .chm, .pdf or .zip files in addition to html content

Why hardly any French or Japanese documentation links for some of the above search queries? Those links did not make it into the Wayback Machine.

What are the cmh links in the results? The .chm files are Microsoft Compiled HTML Help for local help files. For more recent Windows versions you need an external CHM Viewer as Windows itself does not support the format well any more² (the codebase is unmaintained and usage is restricted for security reasons).

Why use Delphi 2007 and 2009 documentation at all you ask?

It’s simple:

  • not that much has been change in the parts that were documented in Delphi 2009 (which added a truckload more documentation than Delphi 2007 had)
  • some information is only available in the Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009 documentation (some parts did not survive the migration of the docs to docwiki format)
  • the docs format uses way more screen estate than the docwiki format

¹ the QC content:

² CHM support in recent Windows

Buillt-in support for CHM files on Windows is sub-par, see for instance:

An alternative is [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – eBookProjects/uChmViewer: A fork of Kchmviewer, the best software for viewing .chm (MS HTML help) and .epub eBooks. which has Windows builds in the releases and supersedes the unmaintained [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – gyunaev/kchmviewer: kchmviewer is a CHM (Winhelp) files viewer written on Qt/KDE. It can be build as a standalone Qt-based application, or a KDE application. The main point of kchmviewer is compatibility with non-English chm files, including most international charsets. (which only had source code in the releases).

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2026/07/21 at 18:00 and is filed under Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Development, Internet, InternetArchive, Power User, Software Development, WayBack machine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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