Hi all,
I've released a new major version upgrade to the West Wind Client Tools v7.0 (v7.04 actually).
This is a full version upgrade release - it's been nearly 5 years since the last major upgrade. If you've been keeping up with v6.x then the number of changes and updates are like a big point release but if you're on earlier versions that have been a ton of things added in improved.
As always there's a shareware version available to try the new version out:
To upgrade you can use the following link:
If you purchased the Client Tools after February 1st, 2018 you can get a free upgrade to version 7.0. All older versions require an update.
What's new?
As mentioned this is a major point release, but this primarily because a 5 year period of incremental updates has passed and because the related West Wind Web Connection has recently rev'd to 7.x as well.
Most of the new features in this particular update continue the incremental improvements path, so this isn't a major upheaval of features and changes.
However, there are a number of new features and enhancements in this release. Some of the improvements include the following.
New wwDynamic Class
Added a new wwDynamic class which makes it easier to create objects dynamically at runtime (and support proper casing). This is especially useful for building objects in code for JSON serialization or for returning tuple like dynamic results from functions and methods.
Remove VCX Classes
I've also removed the remaining VCX classes - wwSql, wwBusiness and wwXml - with PRG based versions which make it easier to work with these libraries in projects and source control. (old versions are still provided but not recommended). wwBusiness has been changed to wwBusinessObject to allow both classes to live side by side since some users may absolutely require VCXs for existing applications.
wwHttp Improvements
There are a number of improvements and fixes on how files uploads are handled in the wwHttp class. You can now specify specific content types for each multi-part form variable as well as specify additional headers. This might be required by some services that receive multipart form data and are fussy about the Mime headers sent with each bit of data.
There are also improvements that allow upload of files greater than 16mb.
Finally there are now explicit .Get(), .Set(),.Put() and .Delete() methods that complement the generic (and inappropriately named .HttpGet() method).
There's also a new method that retrieves all HTTP TLS Certificates installed on the local machine which has been requested on multiple occasions in order to work with client certificates installed in the local certificate store.
File Utility Updates
If you've ever struggled with retrieving proper cased file names from disk, you've probably found that FoxPro (and even the Windows API) makes it very difficult to return file names with proper casing presevered. This release adds a couple of helpers in wwUtils, GetFullPath() and GetRelativePath() which turn local paths into properly cased paths. In addition there are also two new UI helpers OpenFileDialog() and SaveFileDialog() which also return file names in proper case, unlike FoxPro's GetFile() and PutFile(). All of these methods use .NET and wwDotnetBridge.
This release also syncs with the libraries in West Wind Web Connection so all the libraries are now up to date and in sync between both tools.
There's more and you can see all that's new here:
Questions, Feedback or Issues? Please join us here on the Message Board
As always, I want to hear from you, if you run into any issues or have relevant feedback. A number of recent releases had a number of updates and fixes that were directly the result of feedback on the message board, so it's useful to get involved both for you and all the quiet lurkers out there 😃
Talk to you soon,
+++ Rick ---
