when you have a prolonged job you can show a animated (rotating) hourglass as cursor. Here is the way how to do it.

If your program has a prolonged job, you can show an hourglass in the meantime. When the job takes a very long time the user may still think the computer has given up. If it isn't possible to use a Progressbar, you can use a rotating hourglass. Therefore Windows has a file named hourglas.ani that you must load at the startup of your program. Pay attention that that the name is in the Dos 8.3-format, in which 'hourglas' is with one 's'.

This code snippet shows how to load the cursor in the OnCreate of your main-form:

procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Screen.Cursors[1]:=
    LoadCursorFromFile('C:\windows\cursors\hourglas.ani');
end;

Instead of using a 1 between the '['-brackets you can use any positive number (negative numbers and zero are used by Windows). For instance you use this number like:

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Screen.Cursor:= 1;
  //long time job
  Screen.Cursor:= crDefault;
end;

If you have NT instead of Windows, the rotating hourglass will be in 'C:\winnt\cursors\hourglas.ani'.

If you have a program that is used by NT as well as Windows, it will be smart if the cursor is looked up in the right directory. This can be done as followed:

procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
  sPath: array[0..MAX_PATH-1] of Char;
  P: PChar;
begin
GetWindowsDirectory(sPath, SizeOf(sPath));
P:= PChar(IncludeTrailingBackslash(sPath)
     + 'cursors\hourglas.ani');
Screen.Cursors[1]:= LoadCursorFromFile(P);
end;

The function IncludeTrailingBackslash exists since Delphi 5. If you have an earlier version you must write some code yourself. If you have Delphi 6 you can use IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter which is compatible with Kylix.