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.
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!
Discover the power of dynamic forms
You’ve told us how much you want a feature to dynamically build forms fully adapted to your end users’ needs. Well, we heard you, and 4D v16 R6 now opens new opportunities with dynamic forms! Provided as a preview in 4D v16 R6, dynamic forms allow you to programmatically build your forms in an object or load them from a text file. But this only scratches the surface of what we’ve cooked up for you…
A wide range of possibilities to manage your collections
4D v16 R6 provides advanced capabilities to manipulate collections, thanks to a series of methods to be used with Object Notation. Over 40 methods are now available, which allow, for example, the ability to add or remove elements in a collection, sort it, search the elements in it and much more! There are so many new possibilities that it is impossible to present them in a single post. This post is the first of a series you don’t want to miss…
Dates inside objects!
Objects are great! Their flexibility, combined with speed and elegance, make them a first choice for most developers. Using dates inside objects is now easier and more intuitive. From now on, dates can be set as dates – and not strings inside objects!
Sharing information in multi-threading environment
4D v16 R6 introduces a new concept of communication between processes: shared object and shared collection variables! They are a solution so you can avoid using interprocess variables (which can’t be used in multi-thread mode). Thanks to this, you will be able to easily share information between preemptive processes.
Four different ways to use objects with 4D Write Pro!
Quite frankly, we love objects. 4D Write Pro uses objects as the input/output of commands and functions to manipulate documents, text, paragraphs, etc. In this blog post, we’ll show you four different ways to use objects with 4D Write Pro.
Working with JSON Pointers
In 4D v16 R4, we enriched object commands so you can validate JSON objects. 4D v16 R5 is going even further by introducing the support of JSON pointers. Great – but what is a JSON pointer and what can I do with it?
Just like you don’t store company details for each employee in a database record (using a link to the company record instead), it can be really useful to structure a JSON document with parts that can be reused in a number of places.
For instance, let’s take an example of a website order; the customer enters the shipping address and designates the billing address as the same. Instead of duplicating the address information, we can define the shipping address as a reference to the the billing address.
Don’t be afraid of undefined values
With 4D v16 R4, we introduced Object Notation which is a great enhancement to the 4D language: your code is fast, flexible, efficient and elegant! This feature created a lot of interest on the 4D forums and we received a lot of feedback from our customers highlighting situations when there were undefined values making the code challenging to write.
With 4D v16 R5, we have taken your feedback into account and have simplified the use of undefined properties and values with Object Notation.
Passing data back and forth between forms
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just open a form and pass it some parameters to initialize your form objects? What about being able to also get the data back to process, after it’s been modified by the user? 4D v16 R5 makes your coding so much easier by greatly simplifying communications with forms.
Until now, when you wanted to display data (not coming from the database itself, but computed or external) to multiple users, you had two options: either write complex code to handle data display in multiple processes, or create as many forms as necessary with a bunch of global variables. But you know that global variables are not an optimized way of coding, from a memory point of view.
So get rid of your complex code and global variables! With 4D v16 R5 you can just bind an object to your form and use it internally with the new Form command. Painless…and powerful!
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