Tips
Add Komoncharoensiri

Tips & Tricks for your 4D Apps – January 2023 Edition

by Add Komoncharoensiri, Director of Technical Services at 4D Inc

 

Here we go with another set of tips and tricks.

The 4D Knowledge Base is a library of information about 4D technology where weekly tech tips and monthly tech notes 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 25 tips:

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Product
David Azancot

4D for Mobile : Get Mobile Users’ Cookies

As you probably know, scalable sessions have been available since 4D v18 R6. They’re a web session type that is able to handle several processes in preemptive mode. This means they can handle several user-agent requests simultaneously and share data between these processes.

Well, 4D v19 R7 greatly enhances this feature and makes it available to 4D for Mobile.

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Product
Nicolas Brachfogel

Developing Concurrently on 4D Server in Project Mode

Since its release in 4D v18, Projects drastically expanded 4D’s capabilities by bringing compatibility with version control systems —among other things.

With excellent feedback, we couldn’t be prouder to see significant adoption of this feature among the 4D community. This pushed us to improve it to make it even better. 

Your feedback included a request for the possibility to work simultaneously on a single development server as a team. Again, 4D listened, and we are thrilled to announce that with 4D v19 R6, you can work on a development server in project mode!

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Tips
Thomas Maul

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:

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

Improved productivity with Object check syntax

Auto-completion for classes is available since 4D v18 R4. This feature simplifies code writing and limits errors in function names, for example. But it doesn’t avoid them entirely; it’s easy to reverse two letters or to forget a capital letter, and then have to spend time looking for why your code doesn’t work.

So what better way than to ask 4D to check if the classes or functions already exist?

Starting with 4D v19 R4, a warning is displayed in the code editor if you call a function that does not exist.

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Product
Vanessa Talbot

Quickly jump to different functions of a class

Classes were introduced with 4D v18 R3. They allow you to organize your business logic and separate it from the UI part more quickly.

Classes are composed of several functions of varying lengths, so it’s not always easy to find the function you want to modify, or to move from one function to another. You can use the explorer, which displays classes and functions, but when you’re coding in the editor window, you don’t want to waste time changing windows.

With 4D v19 R4, the list of functions in your class is displayed in the code editor toolbar, allowing you to easily jump to a specific function. 

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News
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4D v19 R4 Beta starts today

Yet another release, but not just any other release ?

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of beta testing for 4D v19 R4, which incorporates many features you requested, plus features we believe will be delightful to use!

Without further ado, let’s take a look and see what it has in store for you:

 

  • Upon your request, we supported high-resolution displays, such as 4K displays, in Windows. This results in better text and image quality.
  • Another highly requested feature is at your disposal, the possibility to launch an external process asynchronously to enhance your users’ experience. 
  • What about pessimistic lock management via REST? YES, we have that too.
  • As for the 4D language, we couldn’t be more excited to share the many improvements we made available with you to elevate your coding experience.
  • 4D Write Pro is embracing the dark (mode)! And enabling you to add page breaks inside table rows.  
  • Speed up your development process with 4D View Pro “templates.”
  • The code editor has its share of features. For example, comment tags, quick access to different class functions, and syntax error checking.
  • And much more (see below)! 

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Product
Fabrice Mainguené

Debug on the server with scalable web sessions

Scalable web sessions were a significant improvement brought by 4D v18 R6. They allow you to use 4D tags, 4D actions, and REST API in preemptive processes, even in interpreted mode, on a 4D server. However, to debug such programs, you needed to open your development environment on the server to make it switch to cooperative mode, as the debugger window cannot be opened with preemptive processes. This way, until v19 R2, you could debug REST, 4D actions, or 4D tags. From v19 R3, all of this has become much easier, and you can debug on the server-side simply by attaching the debugger to it, as usual.

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