More standard actions for Styled Text areas
You want to quickly create a toolbar for your Styled text areas. You want to change the font of the text or compute/freeze 4D Expressions without writing a line of code. It is possible using the new standard actions for Styled Text areas.
Just associate a standard action to each button object and 4D will handle everything automatically: action triggering but also the button activation or deactivation if the action is not available in the current context.
Merge your windows into tabs on macOS Sierra
Thanks to macOS Sierra, applications now have to opportunity to use tabbed windows instead of multiple windows. From 4D v16 R3, 4D Developer Edition 64-bit can take advantage of this Apple’s new feature for the design environment.
The type of windows that can be tabbed are Methods and Form Editors windows. Other windows as explorer or tools for instance remain separate.
As in every application based on tab windows:
- each tab can be moved to a new window by dragging the tab out of the tab bar.
- each tab can be moved to another existing window.
Export results of “Find in design” dialog
When you search for all objects in the Design Environment, 4D displays the results in the hierarchical list. From 4D v16 R3, you can export these results in a text file that can be opened using a spreadsheet for example, so that you can easily dispatch some refactoring work or store the results in a document to work on it later.
New object: an easy way to initialize an object
Discover New object, the new command of 4D to initialize an object. This command allows you to either create an empty object or create it with some initial properties and values. OB SET is now becoming unnecessary in several situations, New object is enough.
New object also allows to re-initialize an temporary object in a loop or simply directly pass an object as a parameter to a 4D command requesting an object as parameter, as Get database measures or GRAPH commands for instance.
This new command changes your way to write 4D code in many situations. New object creates an object and returns a reference to it. It allows more flexibility in your code. This command is the first of a series of new features related to objects … Stay tuned !
Create your own interface for 4D Write Pro
You want to quickly create a menu bar to manage your 4D Write Pro areas? You want to create your own contextual menu for your end-users ? You would like to create a color mosaic to change the document background? So this feature is made for you – and better, you do not even need to write a single line of code…
We added standard actions to handle 4D Write Pro areas. They can be defined at design phase or by programming. More than 80+ actions are available and to name just some of them: Font style (bold, italic, underline), Font color, Background color, Text alignment (left, center, right, justify…), Borders (style, color, width, radius…), Spellchecker actions…
Something important to notice, when assigned to interface objects, standard actions automatically handle the activation/disabling of the object depending on the context. Easy!
Timestamp is now available !
“Time is money“, said Benjamin Franklin, so the more accurately we can count it, the better. We now have a new command for getting a precise UTC time stamp including milliseconds.
New info available in MSC dialog
If you are using a huge database with a lot of data, you should be very familiar with the 4D MSC dialog. The Maintenance and Security Center contains all the tools needed for information, verification, analysis, maintenance, backup & compacting of data and structure files.
Based on recent feedback from some of our users, we have enhanced this dialog in three ways:
- A link to the path of the log file has been added
- New global information on the data is accessible
- Information about tables are now available in both maintenance and standard modes
Search by linking array attribute query arguments
Object fields, introduced with 4D v15, allows to store and index unstructured data. This could be a common set of data, like first name, last name, birthday. It could be different data in each record, such as a shop that will need different attributes for shoes (size, color), computers (CPU, memory), printers (color, ink), a list of values or all in any combination.
Here is a real User Story from a 4D customer :
“My badge application manages the access rights for each person to a building and for a time slot. This information is stored in a database as an array of objects ( e.g.: {access right, building, time slot} ). I want to be able to look for people who have access to a building during a time slot.”
4D provides several ways to query for data, using index and so extremely fast.
Improvement of Find in Design dialog
Find in design dialog has been upgraded to offer a more user-friendly design as well as 2 new features that will improve the user experience : a new stop button allowing to stop the ongoing search and a new option to filter your search results.
Easily create cross-tables reports with the Quick Report editor
A new step has been reached in 4D v16 R2 with the 64-bit Quick Report editor: the cross-table reports are now available!
As you probably already noticed, the new Quick report for 64-bit versions had been fully redesigned since v15 R3 to provide you and your end-user with a better user experience. After list reports which were available as the very first step, we are now moving forward and delivering cross-table reports.
Contact us
Got a question, suggestion or just want to get in touch with the 4D bloggers? Drop us a line!
* Your privacy is very important to us. Please click here to view our Policy