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Roland Lannuzel

LIST BOXES: More Control. More Beauty!

List boxes are powerful and very customizable form objects. And their power is extended with 4D v19 R6 thanks to two new properties: horizontal and vertical padding (the inner margins or the space between an element’s content and its border). They will give new presentation possibilities to your list boxes, and an even more professional appearance to your interface, 

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Vanessa Talbot

New Windows system rendering engine for Web Areas

Web areas can display various types of web content within your forms: HTML pages with static or dynamic contents, files, pictures,… You can choose between two rendering engines for the web area, depending on the specifics of your application:

  • the embedded rendering engine
  • the system rendering engine

 

The advantage of the embedded system is the cross-platform portability. No need to adapt to some specifics of a platform. Moreover, it allows you to access 4D methods. 

The advantage of the system browser is the security updates that are available right away. There’s no need to wait for the next version of 4D. We recommend it for accessing the public Internet site. 

Windows has announced that “Internet Explorer 11 is retiring on June 15, 2022“. So since 4D v19 R5, if you use the system rendering engine, 4D uses Microsoft Edge WebView2. This change allows you to benefit from a modern browser with the latest features and security updates. For example, Microsoft Edge can be used to display PDFs.

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ORDA – Optimize performance with full control over REST requests

With a previous version, you discovered how ORDA REST requests had been automatically optimized to increase performance when working with a remote datastore and client/server configurations.

You learned that you can use contexts to take advantage of the automatic ORDA REST requests optimization.

That was a significant step, but now we offer to have complete control over the behavior of your REST requests. Since performance is a strategic concern, you must be eager to discover this new feature!

And that’s not all; new tools are now available to help you understand and debug your issues.

Keep reading for a complete presentation.

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

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.

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ORDA: Thoroughly compare two entity selections

Since ORDA allows you to work with several entity selections simultaneously, we’re sure you take advantage of this by passing entity selections as a parameter to project methods or to functions of ORDA Data model classes.

To work efficiently with object-oriented programming using as few lines of code as possible, you need robust and optimized functions. That’s why with 4D v19 R3, we are shipping a new function available on the entitySelection object: the selected() function.

Thanks to it, you’ll be able to inspect and compare two entity selections. Let’s see the details!

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Roland Lannuzel

Need a magic wand? Here are computed class properties!

The apparition of classes in the 4D development environment has made programming more modern and easier to scale. Classes allow the definition of properties, functions and also support inheritance.
In your application, you probably have a class to manage scientific or financial data. Let’s take the example of financial data. Say you have created functions to calculate taxes. If you also manage several countries, you may have used inheritance to manage the different rules. Then, you display these results in a list box, but if the user changes one of the attributes used in the formula, you have to manage this event to update the result.
With 4D v19 R3, 4D allows you to simplify this process thanks to computed properties: You can define a get and set function for your computed property, and when you add your property to a list box, everything is handled automatically by 4D. No more business logic in your UI.

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Product
Roland Lannuzel

A magic show awaits you with ORDA’s computed attributes!

It is often helpful or even essential that databases be adapted in a flexible and evolving way to users and their businesses in the computer world. The control of accessible data is also a recurrent and sensitive subject. From this point of view, developers use methods and formulas that are sometimes complex to give or restrict access to information, depending on the context or the access rights of the users.

Let’s take a simple example. In your application, you sometimes need to display a list of people. One of the columns displays their full names, but in your database, you have a first name field and a last name field. Currently, you write a formula in the list box column, and you have to manage the sorting on the column yourself. Wouldn’t it be great to have a computed field where you can define its calculation formula and sorting method, and have all the business logic inside the class and not in each interface?

Well, starting with 4D v19 R3, 4D provides a solution to this, with computed attributes.

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