4D v19 beta starts today

Beta testing for 4D v19, one of the best LTS yet, is starting today, six months earlier than planned, to provide you with a Silicon native version of 4D

This includes more than +80 advances, including the introduction of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in 4D thanks to Project mode, major enhancements to existing products, and highly requested features you voted for.

Buckle up, and let’s discover some of what 4D v19 Beta has to offer:

 

  • Apple Silicon support: be ready to give your 4D application a boost right away thanks to Apple M1’s remarkable performance and the brand new 4D compiler.
  • ORDA: write business-oriented code to hide complexity, reduce errors, and speed up the development process.
  • 4D for iOS: be productive anywhere with our mobile solution. Check inventory in the warehouse, generate invoices during client visits, perform inspections onsite, and more.
  • OOP: thanks to Project mode, take advantage of object-oriented programming concepts for greater productivity, better code quality, and lesser maintenance costs.
  • 4D language: discover how the versatile tools of the 4D language improve your developer experience.
  • 4D Write Pro: Word documents import, PDF export, enhanced UI, more commands to manage your documents with code, and plenty of features to produce beautiful documents in record time.
  • 4D View Pro: localized UI. More than +20 new commands to programmatically handle your documents and more.
  • And much more (see below).

Download 4D v19 now (Exclusive to 4D Partners)

Native Silicon support

 

Following Apple’s groundbreaking announcement (the new Silicon Macs), we released 4D v19 six months earlier than planned to provide you with a Silicon native version of 4D as soon as possible. With a brand new compiler and notable performance enhancements, you’ll be able to use this LTS earlier than expected.

It’s time to run your 4D application on that shiny new Apple Silicon Mac!

 

ORDA

Starting with 4D v19, ORDA makes it possible for you to:

  • write business-oriented code to hide complexity, reduce errors, and speed up the development process thanks to high-level class functions above the data model
  • expose your project like an API with a REST server
  • execute some functions on the client or on the server, and choose which functions to publish (or not) as APIs for REST clients thanks to functions scope
  • have an up-to-date datastore automatically without restarting 4D
  • anticipate answers for future use cases related to scalability and performance thanks to shareable entity selections
  • use ORDA or objects more easily in PROCESS 4D TAGS or SHTML, thanks to the new 4D tag 4DEACH
  • extract data from an entity selection with the extract() method, and invalidate the entity selection data in the ORDA cache with refresh()

 

 4D for iOS

Work Offline

4D for iOS already allows viewing data while offline. Starting with 4D v19, offline writing is supported. When no network is available, your tasks are put in a queue, waiting for the 4D server to be available. This way, you can work offline and interact with your server in a very flexible way. 

Sign in with QRCode

4D for iOS provides a new and modern way to log in. The new authentication scheme based on QR codes allows users to quickly sign in to a website, without having to memorize or type in a username and password. With this new scheme, they can simply scan QRCode to access their app, or access it directly if they’ve already been authenticated.

AND MUCH MORE…

Get your customer signatures after a package delivery with the ability to sign with a fingertip, and turn your iPhone into a barcode scanner to manage your inventory. Go the extra mile and deliver 4D for iOS apps with better than ever ergonomics thanks to Many to Many relations support, and keep your app users engaged with instant UI updates providing them with real-time data that they can check upon receiving a notification. And even more features are available, making the product ideal for mobile teams in the field.

 

Project Mode

Projects are a type of architecture that represents a giant step forward for 4D applications. They add the ability to leverage source control tools, collaborative programming, code sharing, modularity, and much, much more. At the time of writing this manual, thanks to the project architecture and the ability to share project application source code via a source control system, we’ve published more than 45 repositories to GitHub. This includes HDIs, components, and full example applications. 

4D v19 brings a whole new set of features that will greatly enhance your programming experience. 

Object-oriented programming (OOP) in 4D

Thanks to project mode, we introduced classes in 4D v19. You can now take advantage of object-oriented programming concepts such as polymorphism and inheritance to write your own class libraries. If you love using objects, you will adore the OOP paradigm where everything is represented simply as an object. 

Save time and effort with direct CSS Preview

In 4D v19, you can preview the final CSS rendering in the Form editor. This feature was the highest voted feature request, and the fastest to become a top-voted feature request on our feature request forum

A new icon in the toolbar allows you to view your form with or without CSS rendering, and even see what it would look like with specific CSS rendering on Mac or Windows.

Macros

Macros are another interesting Form editor feature. They make your daily development easier and automate repetitive tasks. Some macro examples are available on GitHub. Feel free to integrate them into your applications as components to test them out!

AND MUCH MORE…

Thanks to project mode, we’ve introduced more features such as method documentation, server code development, naming parameters, and we’re just getting started!

 

4D Language and more

More mail features

The Mail feature set is still expanding with 4D v19. It’s easier to use and more powerful than 4D Internet Commands. 

Besides enabling email reception either with IMAP or POP3, 4D v19 allows you to create, delete, and rename mailboxes with IMAP, save a copy of your emails after sending them, search and download emails, connect your mail transporters with an OAuth 2.0 token (support for IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 transporters) along with a dozen of new functionalities.

Dark mode support on macOS

4D v19 brings Dark Mode support on macOS, the latest trend in app design that mimics nighttime. This is just the beginning and more will be released in future versions, such as support in all components (e.g. the 4D Write Pro widget), and Design Mode.

Code editor

If “creating my own theme” is on your bucket list, now’s the right time to check it off! 4D v19 comes with basic themes that you can enrich and adapt to your own taste.

Besides theme management support, the new declaration syntax enhances autocompletion, and the display of prototype and short description in the code editor facilitates code writing.

Web-related features

4D v19 is packed with many web-related features: from scalable web sessions that will greatly improve the performance of your web applications, and support for Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), to security enhancements regarding cookies.

With the new 4D Data Explorer preview version, 4D developers and administrators can explore 4D application data in a web browser (no need for a Web Server license).

List box

We know List boxes are an important element of your 4D applications. With 4D v19 comes footer calculations and time columns, click management in edited cells, improved type ahead, new commands to set up movable rows, and better row selecting.

The cherry on top? You no longer need a 4D View Pro license to automatically adapt the height of each row to its content (so that the full text or picture can be displayed) or use object arrays in columns (to enable entering and displaying various types of values in the rows of a single list box column), these advanced functionalities are free!

AND MUCH MORE…

4D v19 contains over 30 new features to ease your development process, including new options and additional information that will make it easier to trace and debug your code, more commands to search and compare strings, a remote debugger to help you debug if you run your server in headless mode (or as a Windows service), object and collection enhancement, and better XPath support.

 

4D Write Pro

Convert your Word documents to 4D Write Pro format

A highly requested feature. You can now import .docx documents into 4D Write Pro. 

Find and replace enhancement

Finding and replacing text inside a 4D Write Pro document was already possible, but a new command makes this process faster than ever.

Locate all the breaks

Sometimes, you need to locate a certain type of break to replace it with another, or simply delete all its occurrences in the document. A new function makes this possible.

AND MUCH MORE…

4D Write Pro features set has grown even more with 4D v19: Without installing any print drivers or additional software, 4D Write Pro documents can be exported directly to PDF format. A new document property defining how carriage returns should be treated is available. There are new standard actions targeting tables, rows, and cells. Support of protected attribute has been added, along with a set of commands that allow you to manage formulas inside your 4D Write Pro documents. The UI got its share of features as well: a new tab is available in the 4D Write Pro interface widget, allowing you to import and export documents in different formats. You can also select which pages to display. We’ve also brought enhancements to both the toolbar and the sidebar. All this and much more awaits you in 4D write pro.

 

4D View Pro

Enhancements with SpreadJS v14

4D v19 comes with a new 4D View Pro ribbon. Besides the fresh look, we’ve added new features to support the new functionalities of SpreadJS v14. This new toolbar brings new functionalities such as:

  • Accessibility Support: provides adequate accessibility support for users using assistive technologies such as screen readers.
  • Comment Indicator Customization: users can now change the color and size of the indicator.
  • Copy Images from Excel: supports copying images from Excel and pasting them into sheets. The pasted image will have the same size, border, and background as it did in Excel.
  • Fill Effects and Patterns: enhance cell appearance in a spreadsheet by applying pattern or gradient effects to the cells. 

AND MUCH MORE…

4D v19 also includes support for six languages. In addition to English, we’ve added support for French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese! If you’re a 4D v19 and above user with an operating system matching the supported languages, you’ll notice that all of the 4D View Pro elements are now translated (Ribbon, toolbar, contextual menu, error messages, etc.).

Also, many commands are available to:

  • find data, formulas, or tags and replace them in the entire sheet or only a specific part of it
  • create custom functions in 4D View Pro to execute a 4D formula
  • manipulate 4D View Pro commands and functions in an offscreen area
  • merge and unmerge a group of cells
  • trigger the calculations of the formulas whenever you wish
  • define various sheet options of a 4D View Pro area. For example, you can protect a worksheet by preventing the cells within it from being edited. You can customize the colors of your worksheet’s tabs, frozen lines, gridlines, or a selection’s background and border and manage the visibility of a worksheet’s gridlines and row/column headers.
  • manage columns and rows: adapt your documents to your needs. Columns and rows can be added and removed, or have their size, visibility, and header label defined.
  • create up to 4 panes in your area: one on the left, one above, one on the right, and one at the bottom
  • know when your calculations have completed

 

Need more technical details? Take a look at the 4D v19 Beta documentation in the 4D Doc Center.


Your feedback is greatly appreciated, and it will help us improve our product to better serve your needs. We’d love to hear your thoughts about any of the features mentioned above. Contribute to our “beta version” forum (accessible to all 4D Partners). Not a partner yet? Become a 4D Partner and join the conversation!

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• Product Marketing Manager • Intissar joined 4D in 2017 as a Product Marketing Manager. She works closely with the product, marketing, engineering, and technical support teams to highlight the ‘why’, the ‘how’, and the ‘what’ of new and updated features to different audiences. This close proximity allows her to craft messaging frameworks and write in-depth content and code samples for the 4D blog and website. After graduating with an engineer's degree in Computer Science from VINCI university, Intissar worked in several startups as a software engineer. Her hands-on experience includes software specification, design, and development, user training and support, and team management.