4D for Mobile: Say Hello to Aliases
As you probably know, aliases have been available since 4D v19 R4. Aliases and computed attributes were a massive step forward for our development framework!
The days of defining business-related formulas in your 4D user interface are over; these concepts offer you a new way to separate your business logic from the UI, enabling you to improve performance by optimizing the parts separately.
And now, with 4D v19 R6, aliases are fully available and ready to use for scalars in your iOS and Android mobile projects as soon your aliases are defined on the 4D side.
The Use of Formulas in Collections & Callback Commands
When you use collections with a member method that needs a callback method, many of you have asked us for a more straightforward way.
You asked; we delivered!
Starting with 4D v19 R6, 4D allows you to use a formula to define a callback in the collection member functions, the EXECUTE METHOD IN SUBFORM, CALL FORM, and CALL WORKER commands. If you can reduce your code to a simple expression, you can pass it directly into the formula without using a method.
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.
4D Write Pro: Dynamically Fill Tables with Entity Selections & Collections
As developers, we often create complex and advanced 4D Write Pro documents. We may generate tables that need to be filled from a data source, and we may not be sure of the exact rows and columns. Manually filling the tables with data every time is a laborious task. We heard you, and here is where data context comes as an invaluable option, opening the world of ORDA and object-oriented development to 4D Write Pro documents.
It is now possible to define a “datasource” for the tables of 4D Write Pro. Whether it is an entity selection or a collection, this “datasource” will automatically feed the rows of these tables.
Let’s delve into the details!
4D v19 R6 Beta Starts today
We are pleased to announce the launch of beta testing for 4D v19 R6! This release is loaded with enhancements and new features that you won’t want to miss!
Let’s take a look and discover what’s new in the 4D v19 R6 Beta:
- Horizontal and vertical padding for list boxes — so your interface can have an even more professional look.
- Developing concurrently on 4D Server in Project Mode — so you can adopt Project Mode without impacting your organization if you still work with binary mode.
- Define a “datasource” for the tables of 4D Write Pro — so the end-users of your application can design or modify templates that will be filled automatically with data.
- Native support for Microsoft 365 — so you can support Single Sign-On, and retrieve information for the authenticated user, to name a few possibilities.
- 4D for Mobile aliases — so you can retrieve values at several degrees of depth and display even more relevant information in your mobile app.
- Much more awaits you!
Tips & Tricks for your 4D Apps – June Edition
by Add Komoncharoensiri, Director of Technical Services at 4D Inc
Here we go with another set of tips and tricks.
As you know, 4D Knowledge Base is a library of information about the 4D technology where weekly tech tips and monthly technotes are actively published. If you missed the last tips on the KB, that’s fine; here is a compilation from the past few weeks.
This blog post covers 16 tips:
What’s new in the 4D Write Pro Interface widget?
4D Write Pro offers many possibilities for both developers and end-users. A wide range of commands and standard actions are available for developers to create advanced and beautifully designed documents, while end-users are offered two feature-rich interface widgets.
Guess what 4D v19 R5 is bringing? Yes, we’ve added a set of features to the interface widget, such as management of line height!
Here are the new features in 4D v19 R5:
ORDA and 4D Write Pro : The power couple!
4D Write Pro documents often contain formulas returning data or calculations depending on the database. Thanks to the use of contexts, associating that data with documents is now child’s play!
In this blog post, we’ll see how the combination of 4D Write Pro documents with data retrieved using ORDA makes the code clear and easy to maintain.
4D v19 R5 Beta starts today
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of beta testing for 4D v19 R5. You told us where you are going next, and this release —like the one before and the ones to come — has the features to help you get there ?
- Besides introducing data contexts, 4D benefits from an upgraded SpreadJS version that brings many enhancements, such as the print interface. 4D View Pro is taking it to a whole new level.
- 4D Write Pro has its share of new features: table headers, linked paragraphs, data contexts, and many improvements to the interface widgets — offering you even more possibilities to produce documents that meet your requirements.
- We’re offering you better control over the ORDA contexts and cache for both Client/Server and REST to improve performance.
- We completely reorganized the diagnostic logs, giving you a better-filtered content (log levels such as trace, debug, info, warn, and error).
- And you can now get rid of unnecessary libraries (e.g., CEF/Web Area, PHP) to reduce the size of your applications.
- Much more awaits you!
Launch an external process asynchronously
Sometimes you have to run processes in the background, and as soon as one finishes, perform some actions according to its exit code. From the v19 R4, 4D allows you to start a process in the background with the new 4D.SystemWorker class and execute callback methods automatically when the process returns information. This way, your application UI stays responsive during the execution of the external process, and when finished, you can display the result to the user right away!
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