4D v11 Plug-in Development

By Akbar

or the last couple of days, I have been working on the migration of one of the 4D Plug-in to the v11, and it has been a fun and frustrating experience (to some extent). It was frustrating, because there is very little help available, and there is no starting guide. You have to explore and go on your own.

To make things life easy for some others (and for my future references), here are some interesting links/resources:

4D Plug-in SDK: http://www.4d.com/us/downloads/products.html

I have found the Plug-in Wizard to be very helpful and idea for Jump Start. Even if you are migrating a plug-in from the older version to the v11 SDK, then you might find the skeleton created by this Plug-in SDK wizard very handy. You can review the skeleton code to see how the new Uni-string parameters are passed, and how to use them.

4D Plug-in SDK Overview: ftp://ftp-developpez.com/4d/documentation/manuels/us/4D-v11-SQL/4D_v11_Plugin_SDK.pdf
Though there is not much detail in this document, but still might contain some new info if you this is your first v11 Plug-in Project.

4D Plugin API, Command Theme List: http://www.4d.com/docs/XKC/XKCMDUS.HTM
This online resource provides a basic info about the each command available in the 4D Plug-in API. Again, though the details are not very thorough, and any clever programmer can easily extract this much info by just looking at the method signature, but this might come handy for a quick reference (specially when you are not in a mode to review and understand each API command call)

4D Plug-in Mailing List Archive: http://old.nabble.com/4D-Plug-Ins-f15655.html
Last but not least is the online mailing archive about the plug-in development. To be honest, this is the largest knowledge base I can find about 4D Plug-in development. If you are stuck into problem, check this first. There are very good chances, that the problem is already been discussed and answered. If it’s not, you can post another thread :-)

That’s all for now. I will try to put some more tips and learnings in the next couple of days.

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