Salesforce

Differences Between Magic xpa 2.5 and 3.0 (Magic xpa 3.x)

Printable View
« Go Back

Information

 
Created ByKnowledge Migration User
Approval Process StatusPublished
Objective
Description

Differences Between Magic xpa 2.5 and 3.0 (Magic xpa 3.x)

Studio Changes

Change of appearance

The Form Designer for Display forms is based on Visual Studio and includes:

  • A Visual Studio-based workspace

  • Docking capabilities

  • A Toolbox that replaces the Control palette

  • A Task Variables pane that replaces the Variable palette

  • A Model pane

  • A Document Outline view that allows you to locate controls and move them to container controls

  • Filtering capability of properties

  • An improved Table control with visual indication for dropping controls over it and automatic attachment of controls to the proper columns

  • A display of the actual .NET control

  • Control alignment lines (when the Show Grid property is set to False).

The Expression Editor was updated to include:

  • Improved Auto Complete of functions

  • On the fly coloring of the expression and expanded view

  • Improved error indications

  • Embedded pick lists in the right pane

  • Change of behavior:

  • Adding an expression as the top line of the Expression Editor is now done by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F4.

  • The filtering capability replaces the Locate dialog box. To search for an entry, simply type any part of its name and all of the relevant entries will be shown.

  • Overwriting an entry is available using Ctrl+Shift+W instead of Ctrl+Shift+O.

  • When the Expression Editor is opened, it is not possible to go directly to other task dialog boxes such as the Sort dialog box. You need to first close the Expression Editor to reach other task dialog boxes.

Selection lists that are opened from the new Form Designer were enhanced as follows:

  • Filtering capability – The filtering capability replaces the incremental locate and the locate dialog box. To search for an entry, simply type any part of its name and all of the relevant entries will be shown. Note that you can start typing even if the focus in not on the filtering field.

  • The description area can be resized.

  • The tasks in the Variable list and the folders in other lists can be collapsed and expanded.

Functionality changes

  • Magic xpa 3 supports an In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) as its underlying messaging layer.

  • Support for display templates was removed.

  • RTF-related properties were removed from the Label control and Label-related properties were removed from the RTF control. To achieve the same functionality as Enable RTF=Yes, you can define an RTF control.

  • All of the multiple-control related actions (such as alignment and make same size) are done now according to the first selected control instead of to the outer control.

  • Selection of a value in a Combo Box and Radio Button control is done via the action arrow of the control.

  • When placing a control in a container control, the control will be automatically attached to the container.

  • Resizing the table header height will also move the controls in the table line.

  • A Radio Button control with the appearance set to Button will show buttons according to the number of items defined and not according to the Choice Column property value.

  • The Automatic Tab Order and Automatic Z-order options were moved from the Command palette to the form properties.

  • In the Form Designer, you can view the ancestor from, by selecting the form from the drop-down list in the toolbar.

  • In the Form Designer, the Edit control will not appear with a transparent background color even if a transparent color was assigned to it. As of Magic xpa 3.2, the transparent color is supported.

  • A Table control cannot be placed on a Tab control using the mouse. If you want to have a Table control on a Tab control, place the Table control on the form and move it onto the Tab control using the arrow keys. However, the controls will not be linked.

  • The Attach to Table option is no longer available in the new Form Designer. To attach a control to a table, use the Link to Parent option.

  • In an Edit control, if Multiline=Yes and Vertical scroll=N, you can now enter any number of lines.

  • The Quick Expression Editor is currently not supported in the property grid of the new Form Designer.

  • The Studio has only English text.

  • The Hebrew Studio no longer appears Right to Left.

  • A new warning message was added for tasks defined with a physical transaction but without a data source. You can disable this message in the Checker Messages settings screen or you can download a script file that will set the Transaction Begin value in your source code to No in tasks without data sources. You can download this script from: ftp://ftp.magicsoftware.com/xpaproduct/Utilities/SetTransactionToNone.zip.

  • The Invoke UDP operation has a new property. The UDP Type property determines whether the UDP will run on the Runtime engine's GUI thread (main thread) or background thread. Up until Magic xpa 3.1a, the UDP was always executed on the main thread. Since version: 3.1a

Mobile functionality changes

  • Magic xpa 3 includes the Mobile Form Preview, which lets you play around with the placement and size of the controls and see how the controls will appear on various mobile devices.

  • Mobile Design Mode – You can now switch to a Mobile Design mode, which takes into account certain constraints necessary for developing a mobile application.

Change of terminology

The Push Button control is now called the Button control.

Removed functionality

The following functionality was removed:

  • Calling a Magic application as a COM object

  • J2EE support and the EJB interface builder

  • SNMP support and the SNMPNotify() function

  • Client Network Recovery Interval for RIA

  • The Maximum width, Maximum Height, Minimum width, Minimum Height control commands are no longer supported. Instead, you should use the Make same size command and select the outer control as the first control.

The following deprecated events were removed in V3:

  • Navigation events: Begin Form, Begin Page, End Form, End Page, More Windows

  • Editing events: Insert Object, Mark Next Page, Mark Previous Page, Mark To Beginning, Mark To End

  • Application events: About Magic xpa

  • Task events: From Value, OK, Redirect Files, To Value, View by Key

  • User Range/Locate events: Clear Template, Clear Value, Define Expression

  • Settings events: Colors, Communications, DBMS, Databases, Environment, Fonts, HTML Styles, Keyboard Mapping, Languages, Logical Names, Logon, Print Attributes, Printers, Secret Names, Servers, Services, User Groups, User IDs, Visual Connection

  • Miscellaneous events: Delete All, Help Topics, Paste Link, Update link

Runtime Changes

Functionality changes

  • Magic xpa 3 provides a new IMDG database gateway for storing and accessing data in the space.

  • The Local and SQLite databases can now support encryption.

  • Since the Local and SQLite databases now support encryption, large Numeric columns no longer support the following settings:

  • Stored As=Packed Decimal

  • Stored As=String Number and SQL Type=Binary

Therefore, it is not possible to open SQL data sources from previous versions if they have these settings or if the Stored As=String Number and SQL Type has no value (since the default SQL Type value was BINARY). Data from such data sources should be converted using a prior version of Magic xpa.

The SQL data source defaults of a Numeric column with a Size of 18 or above were changed accordingly and they now match the Local data source defaults. Therefore, if you need to copy an SQLite data source with large numbers from the server to the client, you no longer need to change the Stored As property or define the BINARY value in the SQL Type property of String Number columns in the Local database.

  • You can now define the color that will be used on a control when the control gets focus. This can be done via a new property, Focus Color, which was added to the Edit control on Online and Rich Client forms. This functionality is not supported for mobile devices.

  • An Online program that is opened using the Select Program property is opened according to its defined Window Type and not as a Modal window, which was the behavior in V2.

  • The error messages shown to the end user at runtime are now translated as part of the multilingual support.

  • A non-modal window opened from a non-interactive task will now keep its window type and will not be changed to a modal window. The non-interactive task will still wait for the called program to end. This behavior is supported only when the following conditions are met:

      1. The Close Rich Client tasks on parent activation environment setting must be set to Yes.

      2. The non-interactive task did not open a window.

      3. The non-interactive was not called from a task with a Modal window type.

Mobile functionality changes

  • The Border Width, Border Color and Corner Radius mobile properties were removed from the Image, Check Box and Radio controls and were disabled for the Image button. To display an image in a border, place the image in a Group control or draw the border in the image.

  • The default value of the Corner Radius mobile property of the Table and Subform controls was changed to 0.

  • The Corner Radius property is now set to 0 when placing controls on a table. This was done to improve the runtime performance.

  • Border Focus Width – Starting with this version, a pixel is no longer added to the border width when a control (with a non-system color) is in focus. If you want to get the previous behavior, you should set the Border Focus Width property manually.

  • The option to capture movies when opening the camera using the ClientFileOpenDlg function was removed.

  • It is now possible to define the header color of the Table control and the color of the Tab control titles.

  • The tabs will no longer be added to the title bar when executed on tablets.

  • On Android and iOS devices, the Group control's background color for a system color will be white.

Android

  • The Android client now supports printing PDFs using the Google Cloud Print protocol.

  • Material design support

  • Improved Tab control – The Tab control will now look like an Android 5 native tab.

  • Native color customization

  • Android 2.3.x and 3.x are no longer supported. Magic xpa is compatible with Android 4.0.3 and above.

  • The Android client now requires compilation using Android SDK 21 or above. This requirement is only for compilation. You can still run the application on older Android operating systems.

  • On Android devices, a Local database is limited to one MB per record.

iOS

  • The iPad mini resolution was fixed and now controls on the iPad mini will have the same size as other iOS platforms.

  • The iOS client now supports a more native look for controls defined with a system color. If you need your controls to appear non-native, you should define them with a non-system color.

  • Some of the splash screen images were removed and some new images were added to properly support iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+ devices.

  • A new sample for using the Touch ID capabilities was added.

Removed functionality

The following functionality was removed:

  • 64-bit requesters

  • Windows Mobile client

Reference
Attachment 
Attachment