New server administration commands
4D continues to deliver features to help you create your own applications to monitor your servers. From programmatically retrieving information about sessions, processes, and the application server, to getting information about the web server.
Having already provided you commands to read about statuses, 4D v17 R4 now gives you the ability to change statuses. You can now create your own administration interfaces as dialogs on the server, client, or even as HTML pages for web access. It’s up to you. These commands allow you to perform the same actions as the standard 4D administration interface. For example, you can send a message to your users to notify them of scheduled maintenance, or block new connections to the application server while you perform an operation on it.
Compatibility settings – all the rest (Part 4)
We began a series of blog posts on compatibility settings and the secret options that can drastically help improve the performance and behavior of your applications (QUERY BY FORMULA, Transactions and period and comma). This final post of the series will give an overview of the remaining settings.
4D Write Pro: WP commands and beyond
We’ve received comments on the forum and TAOW about features that previously existed in the 4D Write plug-in but seem to be missing in 4D Write Pro. Yet, they’ve been available for a long time!
In this blog post, we’ll go through a list of existing abilities in 4D Write Pro that seem to have gone unnoticed. In another words, 4D Write Pro features you didn’t know existed.
After all, 4D Write Pro is not limited to WP commands!
A component to export the structure file
Thanks to 4D v17 R3, you can export your structure file in multiple text files. For example, with only a few lines of code you can create a copy of your database every morning. You can use this to keep track of the history or to send your database to a colleague and see the changes when they’re done working on it.
We provide you a ready-to-use component with only two methods: one to configure the data to be exported, and the other to export your database.
Better documents with two new attributes
To produce a nice document, you need to respect some typesetting rules and fundamentals. For example, the grammar, spelling, and structure of your document shows the quality of your text. One of these rules concerns the distribution of paragraphs and tables over multiple pages.
4D Write Pro offers you two options to manage paragraph distribution:
- Avoid page break inside paragraphs or tables, and
- Avoid widows and orphans for paragraphs or tables.
Let’s dig into more details.
Improving databases tests
As a developer, you’re aware that improving the quality of your developments is often based on unit tests. In order to launch these tests, developers and QA teams need tools to launch 4D databases in different modes (single user / client-server) and distinct environments (Macintosh / Windows).
4D products can already be launched using command line parameters to allow automatic testing or deployment. What if you want to create your own update mechanism or you need to handle a server farm with hundreds of 4D Servers running? Maybe you want to specify which database file to use – or pass parameters on launch …
Get info about the running application
4D v17 R3 takes your database analysis a step further by enabling you to create a customized server administration dialog. Following the ability to retrieve information about users & processes, getting all runtime information about 4D Web server, getting details about the active license, and getting all of the hardware and system details, you now also have the ability to retrieve the activity and network configuration of the running database.
Do you need to know on which IP address and port the database is listening, if communications between the client and the server are encrypted, or if the legacy network layer is used? Just call the new command, Get application info. And that’s not all! This command also returns information about the database such as: the amount of CPU used, the time since its been started, and the list goes on.
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.
Compatibility settings – Nested Transactions (Part 3)
Welcome to our ongoing series about compatibility settings and “hidden” features for improved performance. In the first post, we looked at the QUERY BY FORMULA command and its impact on an application’s behavior. The second post was about the “Use period and comma as placeholders” compatibility option to avoid running into “the numbers are displayed as >>>>>>>>>” hassle.
In this third installment, we’re going to explore Nested Transactions.
What are transactions and how do I use them?
Imagine transferring €200,000 from one bank account to another. You withdraw the amount from the source account, and then you deposit it in the destination account. So far everything is normal and in a perfect world the operation will succeed. Unfortunately, here in the real world things can go wrong. Something happens and the money is lost. That’s very bad.
Well, transactions are here to ensure that this doesn’t happen with your applications! In this blog post explore in detail the use and importance of transactions, as well as several scenarios showing how they can save your business.
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