Tech Tips — The 4 Tips of April are Here!
by Add Komoncharoensiri, Director of Technical Services at 4D Inc
As a 4D developer, you have to keep up with the new advances 4D is continuously shipping. Besides tips and tricks provided by the product team, Tech Tips are another reference for learning some of the 4D concepts.
This article covers 4 tips:
- How to treat SQL wildcard characters as a literal string
- Programmatically get the project name
- Preemptive methods under the same call chain should also be preemptive
- Creating a new View Pro document based on a Sheet
A Deeper Look into 4D Data Encryption
4D offers several great avenues for keeping your business application secured. One of these avenues is to secure the data itself using 4D’s built-in encryption. To help you understand how encryption works under the hood, we are pleased to announce the release of the 4D Encryption Guide.
As our VP of Strategy, Thomas Maul said:
“Encryption is worth taking a few moments to understand how it works. And not only how to use it.”
And we couldn’t agree more because if we don’t understand it correctly, we’ll never use it to its fullest potential.
Whether you are:
- trying to gain a business advantage over your competitors
- dealing (you or your customers) with sensitive data or proprietary information, such as in the financial, healthcare, or legal industries
- just curious about the technology behind this feature
We highly recommend looking into the encryption solution offered by 4D.
Read the Detailed Document
How to notarize your merged 4D application (macOS 12 & Xcode 13)
Note: Update for macOS 12/Monterey and Xcode 13. For Xcode 12 and older, see this blog post.
With Monterey (macOS 12), it’s highly recommended that you notarize applications distributed over a public network. A significant number of developers transfer their applications using a connected storage device or via file-sharing; notarization isn’t required in these cases where the user already trusts the developer. Notarization aims to assure users that the application isn’t malicious and is only required for applications downloaded from a website.
Using our built-in signature feature when building your applications with 4D v18, your application is ready to be notarized. This process is conducted outside of 4D. It involves adding an electronic signature to your application and submitting your signed application to an automated inspection service. Here’s everything you need to know:
4D Write Pro is embracing the Dark (Mode)!
We are pleased to announce that this is the last step for dark mode on macOS. The last widgets of the library are compatible with dark mode:
- 4D Write Pro Interface toolbar
- 4D Write Pro Interface Sidebar
- Rich text area
So starting with 4D v19 R4, the choice is yours, as you can completely develop and deploy using light or dark mode on macOS.
4D for Mobile: Data management improvements
The Data section is available in the project editor, enabling you to filter the data to be embedded into mobile devices. With 4D v19 R4, this data section has been improved to better understand what will be included in your application.
More options for object set enterable command
There is a multitude of interfaces and rules to be respected. Often, these constraints are linked to the domains of activity. Obviously, some data can be entered or not by the user. For a field that is not enterable, there are two ways of managing the interface:
- users can still select and copy its content, for example to add it to a report
- users are not allowed to copy the field or select its content
4D View Pro: Workbook options
When you create a document with 4D View Pro, you often need to fine-tune your user experience by hiding the sheet tabs and the scrollbars, or by deactivating the context menu or the drag and drop option… All these features and more are now possible thanks to the VP SET WORKBOOK OPTIONS command from the v19 R4.
4D for Mobile: Use Object Attributes
As of now, you can use almost all types of attributes in your mobile projects: text, dates, time, integers… 4D v19 R4 is bringing another one.
Say hello to object attributes.
New possibilities to customize the code editor
When it comes to customizing the code editor, everyone thinks of the font and colors of the code. But it is also possible to customize the code editor window and some interactions with the code. Everyone has their own preferences and ways of working.
Moreover, the most essential part of a code editor is the writing code area. With 4D v19 R4, we have redesigned the editor to highlight your code and give it as much space as possible.
This is precisely why 4D v19 R4 enables you to show or hide the ten clipboards. If you don’t use all ten clipboards, you can lighten the toolbar with the “Show clipboard” preference.
Saving project source code without tokens
Commands, constants, tables and fields are stored with their tokens in the project source code files (4dm files). This allows 4D to rename them automatically. But sometimes, you would like these source code files to be stored without tokens for a better readability with a version control system or an external code editor, or for better code sharing between projects. Let’s see how to make 4D store source code without these tokens.
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