Product
Roland Lannuzel

4D Write Pro: Disable Visibility of Empty Images

4D Write Pro documents can contain images from different sources and in various formats. These images may, in some cases, not be displayed for totally reasonable reasons — such as invalid URLs, formulas returning empty images, formats not supported by the platform, etc.

However, they are always represented by a small empty rectangle showing their theoretical location. If you want to change this behavior, 4D v19 R6 is shipped with a new view option enabling you to make empty images completely invisible.

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Product
Nicolas Brachfogel

New text rendering in forms on Windows with DirectWrite

DirectWrite is the modern text rendering API on Windows. It improves text readability thanks to its subpixel quality, and is fully compatible with the most recent technologies. As such, it is a stepping stone to many improvements. Amongst them, the management of high-resolution screens (4K screens) we’re currently working on, and that many of you dearly expect. 4D list boxes moved to DirectWrite in v16 and we decided to make the switch for our text rendering inside forms in v19R3.

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Product
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Invisible Characters on Stage!

Best practices in IT sometimes change, and the management of certain invisible characters in text files is one example. End of Line (EOL) characters have evolved, especially for version control systems integration purposes. In the same way, the Byte Order Mark (BOM) on Unicode text files is less and less used.

With 4D v19 R2, 4D has evolved smoothly to follow these best practices, giving you more flexibility along the way.

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Get ready for the new SameSite and Secure attributes for cookies

Cookies’ abilities have grown and evolved over the years, but they have left some legacy issues. To handle this, browsers (including Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge) are changing their behavior regarding the SameSite and Secure attributes for a secure-by-default model for cookies.

As a 4D web developer, you may be concerned about the 4D web sessions session cookie if you want to prevent your application from Cross-site request forgery.

To prevent your web session cookie from circulating on the web pointlessly or being misunderstood by browsers because of a default value applied, you should ask if it is:

  • a third-party cookie: associated with a domain name different from that of the page where the cookie is encountered. A third-party cookie is placed by a page object (e.g. an ad) originating from a domain other than the one hosting the page

or

  • a first-party cookie: associated with the domain of the page

 

Depending on your use case, you should choose the appropriate value for the SameSite attribute of your web session cookie.

To reinforce security, the Secure attribute must be set for the web session cookie when the connection is secured (HTTPS) to indicate to the browser that the cookie can be sent safely.

Keep reading to learn how 4D has your back to improve privacy and security across the web.

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Product
Nicolas Brachfogel

4D v19 is Silicon Native!

Apple’s groundbreaking release of the new Silicon Macs pushed us to release 4D v19 six months earlier to provide you with a Silicon native version of 4D as soon as possible. We reviewed all our code, ensuring its compatibility with Silicon, performed extensive testing on this new platform, and we’re finally ready to provide you with the first Silicon native version of 4D. Let me guide you through this revolution!

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Deprecated and Removed 4D features: Why and How?

For over 36 years, our main goal has been to enhance our product while ensuring the compatibility of your 4D applications. This, of course, brings change, and change can be frustrating. With this in mind, we always aim to minimize the impact on your businesses with timely announcements, and most importantly, an improved alternative to the deprecated or removed functionality to ensure a smooth transition.

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