Author: Tomas Rutkauskas

In my application I have a TListBox control and I need to store additional data 
along with each item it contains. The additional data will be an integer variable 
and a status variable. What is the best way of doing this? Is there some other 
control I can use?

Answer:

TListBox objects are pointers, but you can cast a 32-bit integer to a pointer and 
store its value directly. Therefore, if your "integer variable" and "status 
variable" can be crammed into 32 bits, you can do this:
1   
2   procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
3   var
4     MyInt, MyStatus: smallint;
5     Combine: integer;
6   begin
7     MyInt := 1234;
8     MyStatus := 5678;
9     Combine := MyInt or (MyStatus shl 16);
10    with ListBox1.Items do
11    begin
12      { store the string and data }
13      AddObject('Foobar', pointer(Combine));
14      { retrieve the data }
15      MyInt := integer(Objects[0]) and $FFFF;
16      MyStatus := integer(Objects[0]) shr 16;
17    end;
18  end;