Made with Foundation

Those of you that worked with Foundation 3.0 might remember a Foundation example database called Safe Place. That demo is now a full-fledged shareware product. Visit the Mere Mortal Software web site to see how Safe Place has grown up.

Free Component

To give you an opportunity to work with a Foundation component with no strings attached, we're giving away the new Foundation Logging component to all 4D developers. You don't need to be a Foundation 4 developer to get it. Just download the component, along with full source code, from the Components page.

Optional Components Download File

You can now download all of the optional Foundation components in a single archive file. You'll find this new option near the top of the Components page.

Under Construction

We've licensed some new icons from The Icon Factory for Foundation. They're part of the new Toolbar component update we're working on for next month.

They'll allow you to display identical icons on both Macintosh and Windows, and display smaller toolbar icons similar to those in previous versions of Foundation. You'll also be able to select from additional icons that can easily be added to your toolbar.

Don't worry, the existing icon set will remain available. You'll simply have more choices available when designing your application's toolbars.

Foundation 4.0.5 Released

Foundation 4.0.5 is now final and ready for download. This release adds many minor improvements, plus over two dozen tweaks and bug fixes.

Your users will benefit from these minor improvements to Foundation's behavior:

• Input windows now remember their position.
• New windows will stack rather than hide open windows.
• The Find and Sort dialogs now remember their settings between sessions.
• Option or Alt-clicking the Find toolbar button displays 4D's Query Editor.
• Option or Alt-clicking the Sort toolbar button displays 4D's Order By Editor.

We've also added two new hooks to give you more control of your application:

• Fnd_aa_IO_InputFormButton: Control what happens when the Save, Cancel, or navigation buttons are clicked in an input form.
• Fnd_aa_Menu_UpdateMenuBar: A standard place to enable or disable menu items, or use third-party menu utilities.

You can download the 4.0.5 release now from the Components page.

New Messaging Component

Have you ever needed a better way to communicate between multiple processes than just setting interprocess variables? Now you've got one. The new Foundation Messaging (Fnd_Msg) component provides a complete interprocess messaging service. Use it to easily send simple (text) or complex (blob) messages between specific processes. You can even broadcast a message to multiple processes with a single call.

This is a new optional component that can be added to an existing Foundation database. And like all of the other Foundation components, you can also add it to any other 4D database even if it wasn't built with Foundation.

New Logging Component

If you've ever tried to debug a problem in a compiled or installed database, you know how difficult it can be. The new Foundation Logging (Fnd_Log) component can help you see what your database is doing when you're not able to use the 4D debugger. Just sprinkle a few log calls in your code, then come back later to view the text file that's been created for you. Because the log is written to an external file, it's ideal for helping you debug a crashing application.