Product
Vanessa Talbot

Convert classic 4D forms to dynamic forms

Your forms may need to be changed depending on your customer or user needs. For example, the color black might be perfect for one user but not so much for another user (who sees blue as the ultimate perfection). Luckily, dynamic forms (introduced with 4D v16 R6) are here to help you handle your users’ preferences. But rewriting an existing form to a dynamic form could be a difficult task, and it’s not always easy to start with a blank page. Ideally, it’d be best to have a draft that can be modified and improved. With 4D v17 R3, it’s now possible to easily convert a classic 4D form (stored in .4DB file) to a dynamic form.

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Product
Fabrice Mainguené

Write your own methods for objects

A new command is at your disposal allowing you to use formulas in your code. You can now encapsulate them in objects and call them when needed. There’s no more need to write your code as text. Now you can just pass your formula in your command and that’s it! This is a great addition, since your code isn’t text, you can benefit from Syntax highlighting and all the other advanced functionalities of the code editor!

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Tips
Vanessa Talbot
New collection

How to display a multilevel collection in different list boxes!

Starting with 4D v17, the content of a multilevel collection can easily be displayed in different list boxes. Meaning that you can bind several list boxes to display nested details … without a single line of code! This can be achieved by simply using an object or a collection as the data source for another list box!

With the new list box collection type, the “Current item” and “Selected items” properties have been added. Keep in mind that the “Current item” property allows you to get an object, while the “Selected item” property returns a collection.

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Tips
Vanessa Talbot

How to create a generic form with dynamic forms

Imagine that your database contains several tables of types or categories. These tables are very simple, often with only an identifier and a text field. For demonstration purposes, let’s say it’s a shoe management database. To qualify the products, we need to define their type, color, pattern, material, season and so on.

It’s cumbersome to manage each of these tables in a list form and an input form and associated methods. In this case, the use of a generic form is essential to avoid duplication and simplify maintenance.

And that’s where dynamic forms and JSON pointers are come in handy!

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Product
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Get machine hardware information

4D v17 goes a step further to let you create a customized server administration dialog. Following the ability to retrieve information about users & processes, getting all runtime information about 4D Web server, as well as details about the active license, you now have the ability to also retrieve all of the hardware and system details for the machine running your 4D server.

Do you need to know what OS is being used, what processor(s), how much RAM is available, etc.? Just call the new Get system info command, locally or remotely! And that’s not all, this command can be extremely useful for quickly diagnosing and solving any problems that may arise.

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Handle entities in an entity selection

FIRST RECORD, LAST RECORD, NEXT RECORD, PREVIOUS RECORD; does that ring any bells? I bet it does. You’ve already been using them to handle selections! ORDA provides useful and familiar methods to navigate through entities in an entity selection – and obviously, some perks!

For starters, you can handle several entity selections at the same time and navigate through them independently, whereas normally you can only manage a single ‘current selection’ per table. That’s precisely what we’re going to see in this blog post.

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