ORDA: an up-to-date datastore without restarting

We’re thrilled to announce that 4D v18 R3 includes an enhancement that will have a huge impact on the developer’s experience. A feature many of you have requested, and 4D delivers!

When you work in 4D standalone mode during the development phase (writing and testing your code), you’re no longer required to restart your database in order to have an up-to-date datastore (ds) when the structure is updated!

Now you don’t need to restart the database each time you need a new attribute or a new table in your code! It’s all automatic!

When you call the ds command, you get an up-to-date datastore object. This means that several versions of this datastore object are handled at the same time … depending on when you updated your structure … without breaking running processes.

If you work in client / server mode, this works fine for code running on the 4D Server.

For remote clients, you simply need to restart the client requiring the structure’s update.

Now you can feel free to update your structure as you want:

• add, remove, rename a table or a field,
• change the type of field,
• add/remove an index,
• update relations between two tables or a recursive relation on a table

… and many other actions, that no longer need your intervention.