Times inside objects… (and everywhere else)
Objects are at it again, continuing to demonstrate their utility to ease your life as a developer.
Using time (or duration) values inside of objects is now smoother and more intuitive. Beginning with 4D v17, times inside objects are set as seconds – and not milliseconds!
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!
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.
Get the position of any part of a 4D Write Pro document
4D Write Pro is continuously evolving; thanks to the new features and functionalities we’re shipping with every R-release. A world of possibilities is wide open! Today, thanks to a new command, you can get a set of information about the location of any element within your documents.
Loops, loops and … more loops!
Like many other programming languages, 4D provides the ability to iterate over numbers with a For(…) / End for statement, or over a condition thanks to the While(…)/End while and Repeat/Until(…) keywords. These iterations (or loops) are very useful, but not the most appropriate way to iterate over advanced data types such as collections and entity selections. That’s why the new For each(…)/End for each iterator has been created, to help ease your coding!
How to create a dynamic form from a table in 3 steps!
4D v17 includes dynamic forms, initially introduced in 4D v16 R6, a powerful and flexible way to dynamically build forms fully adapted to your end users’ needs. The possibilities of dynamic forms are tremendous. In this post, we’ll see a concrete example of what you can do with these new forms.
Find a specific attribute value in a single line of code!
Remember the days when you had to use nested loops and conditional statements to retrieve an object’s attribute? So you ended up with a long and complicated piece of code? Well, those days are over! Thanks to object notation combined with collections and their methods, you’re now able to write code faster, and in a more readable way!
Finding a specific attribute’s value has never been easier. Let’s take a look at a real life scenario and discover how!
Easy access to log files
Log files can be extremely useful for troubleshooting. They’re also a big help for finding the root cause of an incident. Logs let us track of where a problem occurred, and when. Before, with the Get 4D folder command, you could easily access the folder containing all the logs. Now, 4D v16 R6 makes easy to find a particular log file, thanks to the enhancement of the Get 4D file command.
Using path elements in objects
4D is making your developer’s life easier with two new commands to effortlessly manage file or folder paths. Save valuable time with the Path to object command which, in a single line of code, extracts the extension, the file name or the parent folder. Then you can modify and recombine the different object attributes to compose a new path with Object to path.
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!
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