How ORDA will change the way you work
Imagine a way of using your database with an object-oriented approach, without worrying about its physical structure. Imagine that you could maintain multiple current selections at the same time or that you could perform recursive queries in a single line of code. Well, this is now a reality thanks to ORDA! With 4D v17, your code can be written in an object-oriented mode, and you can easily navigate through your entire data model.
ORDA was one of the major announcements of 4D Summit 2018, opening a world of new possibilities in 4D. It’s now time to give you more details about the ORDA features available with 4D v17. To do so, we’ve prepared a series of blog posts dedicated specifically to ORDA core concepts and related features. And we’ll release them, one after another, day after day.
4 different ways to find items in a collection
As a developer, you often need to know whether a specified item already exists in a collection, or to find all the items corresponding to particular criteria. 4D collection methods offer many different ways to look up specific items.
Query collections
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and with over 40 methods in 4D v16 R6 to manage collections, things are getting much easier for you as a developer. Not only is your code clean and more readable, but its also written in record time!
In this blog post we’ll take a look at how the two new methods, query and indices, will allow you to manipulate and retrieve items from a collection in a snap!
Icon modernization continues
While icons may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of design, they actually play a crucial role in improving human-software interactions by offering a method of communication beyond just text.
With 4D v16 R6, we have modernized the look of the Form Editor and the User Form Editor icons to improve readability and clarity.
Calculations in collections
Calculate average, total or price (including tax) are common tasks in any business application. Collections are an easy way to aggregate your data in a consistent way. With it, this type of calculation becomes very simple, because there are collection methods that do everything for you!
Easy access to log files
Log files can be extremely useful for troubleshooting. They’re also a big help for finding the root cause of an incident. Logs let us track of where a problem occurred, and when. Before, with the Get 4D folder command, you could easily access the folder containing all the logs. Now, 4D v16 R6 makes easy to find a particular log file, thanks to the enhancement of the Get 4D file command.
Backup and Security
There’s a saying about not sweating the small stuff, but when it comes to security, it’s often the little things that have the biggest impact.
On the “Backup” page of Database Settings, you’ll notice an option for an automatic restore of the last backup if your database is damaged. To provide you with the best level of protection for your data, this option is now checked by default for new databases, right out of the box.
Combine and sort collections
4D v16 R6 opens a wide range of possibilities to manage collections. Merging two collections into one, cloning or just ordering a collection is as easy as calling a method. It saves valuable time, for example, when you need to concatenate two collections, keep only the distinct values, or sort it.
Autocomplete function expanded to object attributes
Object notation opens new possibilities! To help you adopt this way of coding, we have improved the autocomplete mechanism of the method editor. Whenever you type a dot after an object, you will now get a list of suggested attributes. Just what you need to speed up your coding!
Convert collections
4D v16 R6 provides advanced capabilities to manipulate collections, thanks to 40+ methods to be used with Object Notation. By using them, you’ll be able to write your code in a more efficient way. New code is great, but we also kept in mind that this new code needs to easily integrate with your existing code. This is why we’ve introduced dedicated commands to convert collections to arrays or strings, and vice-versa.
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