Take your imagination to the limit with 4D v17 and 4D Write Pro – Caroline from the 4D Summit 2018
As 4D v17 approaches, it’s worth taking a moment to pause and think of all the possibilities 4D Write Pro has to offer. For those who have extensive 4D Write programming skills and are wondering if 4D Write Pro can compare, this blog post will answer this question and more! We’ll even give you a database example of a complex travel brochure to show you what 4D Write Pro is capable of and how it’s surpassed 4D Write in many areas! And if you’re still hesitant about whether or not to take the plunge, watch this 4D Write Pro video from the 4D Summit 2018 featuring Caroline Briaud, where she presents the capabilities of 4D Write Pro and how far you can go to create complex documents.
Keep track of your formulas with this new command
Imagine you have a list of formulas containing table names and some fields … then days later you decide to rename your tables. Now your formulas are no longer valid, which is totally understandable!
Well, good news: the new Parse formula command allows your formulas to remain valid when renaming 4D language or structure elements.
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!
4D v17 Release Candidate
We are pleased to announce the release candidate for 4D v17.
If you haven’t already downloaded it, it’s not too late! Now’s the time to run your applications on 4D v17, and take advantage of the many features this release has to offer.
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.
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!
Display an entity selection in a list box
4D v17 introduces a new concept: ORDA. If you’re not familiar with ORDA yet, we’ve created a series of blog posts to explain how to use and take advantage of ORDA. When working with ORDA, you’re going to use entity selections, which are basically objects containing references to entities belonging to the same dataclass (i.e. table). One of the main benefits of ORDA, is the very simple and powerful ability of binding with forms.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to display an entity selection in a list box. In fact, it’s very simple.
Compute statistics on entity selections with ORDA
ORDA provides a great feature to channel data through filters and get aggregated values, by including a set of easily-understood aggregation operations that examine and perform calculations on the data sets. For example, the sum, average, count, min, and max methods are used to perform the operations which their names describe!
How to easily handle text insertion in 4D Write Pro
4D Write Pro packs in a lot of commands and functions allowing you to create and handle complex documents by programming, documents which include pictures and text! Today, 4D Write Pro gets its own commands to insert and read text without needing to use commands originally designed for Styled Text! Thanks to these new commands, your code takes full advantage of the 4D Write Pro programming concepts, i.e. objects and ranges. Thus, your code is more elegant and easier to read!
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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