The story behind 4D’s new Markdown-based documentation site
by Arnaud Schmitt, Head of Technical Documentation at 4D SAS
As many of you know, doc.4d.com has long been managed using an in-house 4D application. However, 4D’s documentation is currently in transition to a new architecture: a Markdown-based documentation site.
This was the topic a few weeks ago during a 4D Method meetup, where I shared our experience about creating and maintaining a Markdown-based documentation site. You may find this information useful when you are browsing the 4D documentation site, or if you need to create your own documentation.
Apply naming conventions with Form macros
by guest author Michael Höhne, 4D developer (Munich, Germany)
There’s a feature in 4D v18 R5 that may have been overlooked, or at least hasn’t gotten much attention so far: Form macros. To be honest, I hadn’t spent much time on them either, until recently. In this blog post, I’ll show you a macro that saves a lot of time when applying naming conventions to list box columns, column headers, and footers. You can easily change it to fit your needs. A dedicated repo is also available on Github.
4D for iOS: Build mobile apps in less than 2 minutes
Are you new to 4D for iOS? New to our no-code native app builder that allows you to extend your existing 4D business applications to mobile devices? Or maybe you just need a jumpstart to see how far the product allows you to go?
If this is the case, check out what 4D for iOS can do thanks to its feature set, and watch this video to witness the building of a mobile app in less than two minutes:
Push notification with data synchronisation
As of 4D v18 R4, you can send notifications to your application users. Now with 4D v18 R6, you can start data synchronization with a push notification.
This could be useful, for example, in the case of delivery tracking applications. First, the delivery information is updated in the database, then a notification is sent to the customer. The notification contains a request to synchronize the data, so when the customer consults the record on their smartphone, the data is up to date.
4D View Pro: End of document loading
When you use 4D View Pro (especially in offscreen mode) with complex documents, calculating all formulas could take a while and it can be difficult to know when it’s finally finished (and it’s important to wait before you call commands such as export or print).
As a solution, we’ve introduced two new events. One of which is called for every single calculation/formula, which could be used to trigger a timer. If the time expires without another formula being finished, we can assume that the whole document is finished.
More features in the 4D Write Pro interface widget
The 4D Write Pro toolbar and sidebar continue to grow with more functionalities to help you create documents even faster and easier.
With 4D v18 R6, you can :
- increment or decrement text
- copy/paste the ruler
- change the background color of a paragraph
- change the style of a word (uppercase, lowercase, etc.)
More enhancements to the 4D debugger!
4D v18 R6 comes with new features in the code editor to make things easier for you when writing code.
The same goes for the debugger. We know debugging an application can be difficult, that’s why we never stop working to help make your experience better. This time, we’ve added some options and additional information that will make it easier to trace and analyze your code.
Keep reading to see what’s in store for you:
4D for iOS: Energize your apps
4D for iOS already lets you take advantage of your database relations to create dynamic and complex apps.
But many of our 4D for iOS developers have asked for more, and once again 4D listened! 4D v18 R6 includes splendid features for relation interactions.
Let’s delve into the details!
Scalable sessions for advanced web applications
Nowadays, web applications are essential modern tools. As machines and processors become more and more powerful, your web applications must constantly meet performance requirements. This is why with 4D v18 R6, the 4D Web Server offers a new kind of web session: the scalable Web session.
Let’s find out more!
Manage IMAP flags
To allow your solution to smoothly integrate with other email clients, you often need to add information such as “already seen” or “urgent”. The IMAP protocol allows you to associate a list of flags with a message to manage this additional information. 4D v18 R6 includes a set of functions for the IMAP Transporter object to add or remove IMAP flags.
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