4D Summit 2016: Laurent Esnault presents workers and UI in preemptive mode
Our own VP of Engineering, Laurent Esnault, explains exchanging information between multiple processes AND between processes and forms during his Break Out Session: Preemptive Multi-threading at 4D Summit 2016. Thanks to preemptive multi-threading, you can have more parallel processes, and thus add more and more users, for either desktop or web applications.
If you missed Laurent’s session at 4D Summit 2016, watch this 15-min video and enjoy some personal training by the master of preemptive multi-threading!
Difference between cooperative and preemptive explained by Laurent Esnault at 4D Summit 2016
Laurent Esnault, VP of Engineering, explains the difference between cooperative and preemptive processes during his Break Out Session about Preemptive Multi-threading at 4D Summit 2016. Thanks to Preemptive Multi-threading, you can have more parallel processes, and thus add more and more users, either for desktop or for web applications.
If you missed Laurent’s session at 4D Summit 2016, watch this video and enjoy some personal training by the master of preemptive multi-threading!
Retrieve the license information by programming
When you perform analysis, reporting or debugging of your server application you may want to know the number of available clients, the number of consumed connections, the expiration date and many other information.
Now with 4D v16 R4, you can retrieve detailed information about the active license of your running 4D product (4D Server for instance). For example:
- version,
- platform,
- number of available and consumed connections for 4D Write Pro,
- number of available and consumed connections for 4D Client,
- expiration date,
- …
Create your own process and user monitoring
You need to get the list of processes running on your 4D server, 4D remote or 4D standalone to create your own Administration Window? You want to know which user initiated each process to create a monitoring window of your application or log this information in a database to analyze later your server load? It is now easy to retrieve this information by programming with a new command: Get process activity.
Define the tab order by programming
Here are 2 very common developer needs: 1. Depending on the user criteria, you want to rearrange the objects in the form. – 2. Depending on the selected item in a list, you want to show, hide or move the objects in the form.
In all theses cases, you need to change the tab order of the form objects. Now in 4D v16 R4, you can modify the tab order at runtime by programming. To do so, 2 new commands have been created: FORM SET ENTRY ORDER and FORM GET ENTRY ORDER.
New type supported by 4D: Null
4D introduces a new Null type to ease the management of objects and collections. Thanks to the null value, you can represent a missing value and easily verify if your object or collection is correctly set.
4D initiates a new variable type: Collection
4D v16 R4 introduces a new type of variable called Collection. What are these variables intended for? Like Objects or BLOBs, collections can be used to hold almost any kind of variable types like texts, numerics, booleans, objects and even other collections. The good thing is that, all these variables types previously mentioned can be mixed inside the same collection, where arrays must always contain the same type of elements!
Add an hyperlink to your company logo in 4D Write Pro
A less well known usage of 4D Write Pro product is the production of HTML emails. In fact you can create a 4D Write Pro document including 4D expressions, text and images, then modify the document, paragraph or text properties and send it by email. In this context, a very common need is to add a link to a picture, e.g. your company logo.
4D Write Pro has been enhanced with 4D v16 R4 so that hyperlinks can now been added to text and/or pictures. Setting a link to your company logo or company name is now as easy as styling some text to bold.
Keisuke Miyako presents 4D Tags at 4D Summit 2016
Keisuke Miyako, Technical Service Manager from 4D Japan, presents at 4D Summit Paris 2016 how the 4D transformation tag feature has been highly empowered with 4D v16. If you are not using 4D tags yet – be sure you’ll be thrilled to start using it asap after watching that video!
Besides the introduction of the enhancements done in 4D v16 making 4D tags now so powerful, Keisuke presents here 2 concrete examples of 4D tags use cases: export data to an Excel spreadsheet and create nice charts using a JavaScript library from data served in a JSON format.
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.