Integrate your Own Administration Window for 4D Server
When deploying their applications, some developers want to customize the built-in 4D dialogs to fit their needs. It is especially true for the 4D Server Administration Window where they sometimes want some information and actions to be accessible only for their team and not for their customer administrators.
Automatic integration of multiple journals
As developers and database administrators, you know the importance of quickly recovering from data corruption. Backups and journals help you with the task. But sometimes, a backup may be corrupted, and you need to come back from an older backup and integrate multiple journals consecutively. Or maybe your journal file is growing big too quickly, and you prefer to regularly create a new one to avoid cluttering your server hard drive. Or you are just using your own way of backing up your database. In all these cases, you must integrate multiple journals, which is only manually possible through the Maintenance and Security Center.
With 4D v20, you can automatically integrate multiple journals at database startup. Let me explain to you how it works.
Meet the Improved Distinct Function
Retrieving the list of unique data elements is always helpful when manipulating data. In some cases, retrieving the number of occurrences of each value is essential. The distinct function of the Collection and Entity selection classes allows retrieving a list of unique values. With 4D v20, you can also retrieve the number of occurrences of each distinct value.
And that’s not all!
An object in the database can be used to save custom data entered by the user. So on the code side, you need to know all the possible paths to the object. The distinctPaths function has been added to the Entity selection class.
Here is everything you need to know.
New VS Code Editor Features with 4D v20
As usual, a new release, new VS Code extension features for developers who want to view and edit code with this free editor.
4D v20 brings new capabilities to the Visual Studio Code editor through the 4D-Analyzer extension: Say hello to Document Syntax Checking, which will help the developer to type fewer mistakes, Code Folding and Indentation for a better look, and tool4d to allow faster LSP server starting.
Object and Collection Literal Initializer
In your code, objects and collections can be instantiated using New object and New collection commands.
However, starting from 4D v20, a more convenient and readable approach is available using object literals and collection literals. These new features provide a simpler and clearer way to initialize objects and collections.
QUIC layer: the future of network communications
The most considerable production servers running with 4D accept more than a thousand simultaneous connections, and this number keeps growing. As a consequence, performance becomes an increasingly important focus of our teams. The QUIC protocol, used by the new version of the HTTP standard, has been specifically built to increase speed and reliability. As we are always looking for exciting technologies, we are working on replacing our low-level network protocol with the QUIC protocol.
For v20, you can switch to this network layer and check if it improves your performance. This is still in beta test, as we need your feedback before using it as our default network layer. As such, you will only be able to use it on beta versions of 4D.
Create a Help Menu with a Simple Collection
The “Help” menu of a software is handy. Obviously, you have a menu item to open the online documentation of the software, but also how to contact the support, and several other items depending on the software.
With 4D v20, you can easily create your application’s “Help” menu by passing a collection describing the different menu items.
Break Rows. A New Addition to 4D Write Pro Tables!
The 4D Write Pro document tables have greatly improved over the last few versions. In fact, we, the 4D team, are so invested in making 4D Write Pro a potent template-based documents generator —that we have already released advances such as headers, datasources, carry-over rows…a few powerful features off the top of my head.
Now, with 4D v20, it’s the turn of break rows to make their entry!
Ladies and gentlemen, drum roll, please!
4D Backup, VSS snapshots and the new commands to lock the datastore
4D provides you with multiple built-in ways to backup your data: 4D backup and the use of a mirror server. With 4D v20, 4D exposes internal commands to lock the datastore, allowing you to copy your data while 4D is running.
First, let’s speak about the different means to backup your data with 4D.
New Handy Functions for Collections!
The functions associated with collections were introduced with 4D v16 R6 and have evolved with the possibility to use formulas for some of them, like map() or reduce(). 4D v20 brings other features that are just as practical, which we will present here.
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