This small update runs exclusively for all Xojo 2024r2+ versions and now offers methods to access a few more system details, such as specific folders (MobileApplication.GetCacheDirXC, GetDataDirXC, GetFilesDirXC, etc.) or methods for checking screen properties like MobileApplication.IsScreenHdrXC, IsScreenRoundXC, ScreenHeightDpXC, or ScreenWidthDpXC.

Feel free to take a look at the developer repository, create feature requests, and provide feedback on extending this extension library.

I’m happy to receive any voluntary financial support for the work I’ve done so far, which you are welcome to share here. You can download the project with many examples at https://github.com/XojoGermany/AndroidDesignExtensions.

Happy coding.

Martin T. is a Xojo MVP and has been very involved in testing Android support.

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Control Sets

There are cases where you have a bunch of controls with the same functionality. Imagine you are coding a calculator and you’ve just added the WebButtons for each digit. It would be repetitive and error prone to add the same code to Pressed events, on each button when the only thing that changes is the numeric value.

A set of controls can be grouped, so you can think about them like if you were using an array. You can add event handlers to the group itself. Events will be enhanced with an “index” parameter, to help you decide what to do, depending on the element.

Create Tabs and Embed Controls at Runtime in WebTabPanel and WebPagePanel

Same as with Control Sets, this is something that was already present in Desktop projects and we wanted to include it for Web. From now on, you will be able to create and remove tabs and pages in WebTabPanel and WebPagePanel controls, respectively. Controls can also be added and removed at runtime, or move controls between tabs or pages whenever you need.

This opens a new world of possibilities for your applications, where you can provide your end users a way to have multiple contexts open at the same time.

WebListBox: Configurable Header and Row Height, Border and Line Style

You will be able to configure the height of WebListBox headers and rows with the same API you are used to using in your Desktop projects. You won’t need to tweak them with CSS anymore.

HasBorder and GridLineStyle has also been added to Web projects, allowing you to remove the outside border, display only vertical lines between the columns… or just remove them.

WebDataSource Interface

Speaking of WebListBox improvements, you’ll find that the WebDataSource is easier to implement. You won’t need to implement SortedPrimaryKeys and UnsortedPrimaryKeys methods anymore.

There are only three methods required now:

• ColumnData: Where you will define the amount of columns, names, and configure if they are sortable
• RowCount: So the control can now the amount of space it will need
• RowData: This is where you return an array of rows

WebListBox lazy load rows, meaning that it will only ask your DataSource for the amount of rows being displayed on screen. It will only fetch more when needed.

WebListBox Improvements When Using a WebDataSource

Using a WebListBox with a DataSource makes it possible to display very large amounts of data. Until now, you were able to display thousands of rows very quickly. This release improves the way Xojo uses your DataSource, without having to change a line of code in your projects.

Scrolling through the data will display the rows much faster than before. Just for comparison, 2024r1.1 was able to display 1 million rows in about 6 seconds in my computer. The same project, using 2024r2, can display them in less than 100ms.

But is not just the speed that has been improved. Its memory footprint has been dramatically reduced as well. Displaying 1 million records in 2024r1.1 used about 1 GB of RAM, where 2024r2 will use just a few MB instead.

I can’t imagine a use case where you need to display millions of rows and scroll through them. But if you find one, you will be able to implement it with Xojo

WebButtons Can be Resized Now

In order to make it easier to migrate your Web 1 projects, you will be able to modify the height of your WebButtons. The web framework will also take care to reduce the font size if needed when the button is smaller.

Individual Indicator for Each Segment of WebSegmentedButton

There are situations where you want to mix different “indicators” (different colors) in a single WebSegmentedButton control. For example, pressing on one of the segments can be a destructive action, so you could use the Danger indicator. By default, segments will use the indicator you set in the Inspector panel, but you will be able now to individually override one of them.

Me.Indicator = WebUIControl.Indicators.Primary
Me.SegmentAt(1).Indicator = WebUIControl.Indicators.Danger
Me.SegmentAt(2).Indicator = WebUIControl.Indicators.Success

Having 4 segments, this will be the result of above example at runtime:

Outlined WebButton and WebSegmentedButton

Some GUIs could become overwhelming, when every button looks like a call to action. The new Outlined property, available in WebButton and WebSegmentedButton controls, can help with heavily loaded interfaces. Here is how it looks like:

Performance, Memory Leaks, Bug Fixes

Last, but not least, 2024r2 comes with great performance improvements. We’ve been improving the web server to handle even more requests per second. If you are using Xojo Web for exposing an API, it will be able to serve more requests in less time. For regular Xojo Web applications, it means it will be able to handle more events and reply to them faster.

Here is a comparison of the same project during the different releases of Xojo:

Latency has also been improved, Xojo is able already to reply in less than 2ms:

If you are still serving Web APIs with Web 1, this is a good opportunity to migrate:

That’s a Wrap!

As usual, I’d like to send a big thank you to everyone taking the time creating bug reports, feature requests and testing beta releases. This wouldn’t be possible without your support.

Ricardo has always been curious about how things work. Growing up surrounded by computers he became interested in web technologies in the dial-up connections era. Xojo has been his secret weapon and language of preference since 2018. When he’s not online, chances are he will be scuba diving … or crocheting amigurumis. Find Ricardo on Twitter @piradoiv.

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Compact Display Style

When using the Compact Display Style, the control adjusts itself to offer two fields for Date and Time selection or just one field in those cases when the Display Mode is set to Date or Time. In any case, this Display Style consumes less real screen space in the UI, making it ideal for more compact interface designs.

For example, use it when designing custom cells for a MobileTable DataSource:

Inline Display Style

On the other hand, the Inline Display Style is ideal for date selection because it renders a calendar in the view that speeds up the date selection by the user. It includes options for rapidly moving among the month or the year to be displayed. This is much faster compared with spinning the wheel for a date in the Wheels Display Style:

Conclusion

We are sure that the new Inline and Compact Display Styles will help polish your UIs and we look forward to seeing how you use them in your iOS apps. Thank you to everyone who filed cases and offered feedback for this release.

Happy coding!

Javier Menendez is an engineer at Xojo and has been using Xojo since 1998. He lives in Castellón, Spain and hosts regular Xojo hangouts en español. Ask Javier questions on Twitter at @XojoES or on the Xojo Forum.

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DarkMode

All of the chart types now have the ability to render themselves properly in both light and dark modes. For that to happen, using different colors for data representation when the light or dark modes are enabled, all you need to do is assign ColorGroup instances instead of Color values when creating the DataChart instance.

For example, this snippet of code will create two data sets using ColorGroup instances for the values:

Var dsInflaction As New ChartLinearDataset("Dollar", New colorGroup(Color.red, Color.orange), True, dollar)
Var dsTemp As New ChartLinearDataset("Euro", New colorgroup(Color.blue, Color.white), True, euro)

And this is how it is rendered in light and dark modes:

More Grid Flexibility

We added three new properties the the Chart control itself to better handle the way you want the chart grid to be rendered:

• IsGridVisible
• IsYAxisVisible
• IsXAxisVisible

For example, in previous releases you needed to set the GridColor property to Color.Clear to avoid the drawing of the grid lines in the chart. Now, you can set the GridColor to any other color you (or your app user) may want, and simply control if the grid is rendered or not setting the IsGridVisible property to the True/False boolean value.

In addition to the grid itself, you have the flexibility to decide if the rendered chart will display the X or the Y axis along their values through the IsXAxisVisible and the IsYAxisVisible boolean properties. As with the IsGridVisible property, you can change these values at runtime and the chart will be updated accordingly:

Inline Labels

Also, starting with Xojo 2024r2, for all the chart representations based on a ChartCircularDataset, you will be able to decide if you want the Labels to be rendered inline in addition to these rendered by default in the upper section of the chart, or instead of these. This can get a better identification of the label representing every Pie chart section, requiring less screen space.

In order to display the Inline labels all you need to do is set the ChartCircularDataset.HasInlineLabels property to True.

Conclusion

As always, we look forward to keep improving Charts and see how do you use them in you Xojo developed apps and solutions!

Javier Menendez is an engineer at Xojo and has been using Xojo since 1998. He lives in Castellón, Spain and hosts regular Xojo hangouts en español. Ask Javier questions on Twitter at @XojoES or on the Xojo Forum.

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First of all, if your apps only relies on the Xojo provided iOS framework functionality, then you don’t need to do anything at all. When building or running the iOS app, Xojo will create and add the required PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy file for you.

If you are using Declare calls or rely on iOS third party libraries or plug-ins, then you should check with the developer to know if any of the calls made fall into the Privacy Categories listed by Apple (keep in mind that these can change over time). If so, then it is time to visit the new Privacy Editor available under the Build Settings > iOS section, and click the Settings button in the associated Inspector Panel:

Here you will find the Edit button under the Privacy section. Click on it to bring up the Privacy Editor window:

In the Privacy Editor window, select both the API Type from the entries available in the ComboBox control, plus the associated API Reasons that meet your specific requirements based on the API Type selection.

Of course, you will be able to add as many API Type cards as you may need using the “Add Type” button, or delete any of the previously added cards. If any of your iOS apps share the same Privacy settings, you can simplify the process by creating and saving files in the Privacy Editor. Now you can add those files to your other iOS apps from the Editor via the “Open…” button or by dragging & dropping the file from its current location into the Editor itself.

Once you finish editing the Privacy settings for the iOS project, the PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy file will be created and automatically added when building the iOS app, allowing you to run it the Simulator, any connected iOS device or send it to the AppStore review approval. Learn more about this in the Xojo Documentation.

Javier Menendez is an engineer at Xojo and has been using Xojo since 1998. He lives in Castellón, Spain and hosts regular Xojo hangouts en español. Ask Javier questions on Twitter at @XojoES or on the Xojo Forum.

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Out With The Old

The old database connections were quite limiting, requiring you to create a new connection and re-enter all the parameters whenever one changed. With our new Database Connection items, you can now easily update specific connection parameters directly in the inspector.

Additionally, you can now choose whether the item will auto-connect or if you prefer to connect to it later in your code.

Connecting to a Specific Database

There are times when you need to connect to a database for debugging and testing, but for the final builds, you want to connect to your production database/server. Setting this up correctly with the old database connection method required creating two separate connection items—one for debug and one for release. With the new Database Connection items, this process is much simpler and fits more easily into the build process. You now have several new Database Connection subitems that can be customized based on the stage of your build. These subitems are linked to the Stage Code in your Shared Build Settings, ensuring that when you build a final release, your database connection uses the correct settings automatically.

Additional Database Features

In addition to this change, there are two new database APIs that may be useful to you:

1. A new method, IsConnected, has been added to the SQLiteDatabase, ODBCDatabase, PostgreSQLDatabase, and MySQLCommunityServer classes. This method returns true if the connection is still active, and false if it is not.
2. We’ve enhanced Database.AddRow with a new signature that returns the unique ID of the newly inserted row. This feature is supported for SQLiteDatabase, ODBCDatabase, PostgreSQLDatabase, and MySQLCommunityServer classes. It is recommended to use this new API instead of the deprecated SQLiteDatabase.LastRowID and MySQLCommunityServer.LastInsertedRowID

Let’s explore how the new Database.AddRow feature can assist you. Previously, only SQLiteDatabase and MySQLCommunityServer had APIs to retrieve the unique ID of the last inserted row. Now, PostgreSQLDatabase and ODBCDatabase also have this capability by using the new Database.AddRow(tableName As String, row As DatabaseRow, idColumnName As String = "") As Integer

The new aspect of this signature is the idColumnName parameter and the return value. For databases that support the SQL RETURNING clause, the idColumnName specifies the column whose value will be returned. For databases that do not support the RETURNING clause, we will use the suitable method for each specific database to return a unique value.

We recognize the significance of databases in your Xojo apps. So with these updates to database connectivity for your desktop, web and console apps, and the addition of new features, we aim to make your database programming easier and more efficient.

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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Although still in Beta, there have been many improvements to Android in the last few releases and in this post I’ll highlight a few things that have been added or improved starting with Xojo 2023r4 and through the recently released 2024r2.

Xojo 2023r4

The final release of 2023 had a lot of Android improvements.

You should always read the entire release notes, which have a wealth of details, but here are some highlights of useful new features that were added to Android in 2023r4:

• Added System.DismissKeyboard method that can be used to hide the virtual keyboard.
• The Ptr type can be used with Declares that call Kotlin Library projects. Other usage of Ptr will result in a compile error.
• There is a new constructor on Font that allows you to load a font file from a FolderItem. Easy custom fonts!
• The Barcode class can be used to scan a variety of barcodes.
• The NewAndroidProject command can be used with IDE scripting to create an Android project.
• MobileApplication.UnhandledException event now better captures the user runtime call stack for Stack() and StackFrame().
• There were many internal changes to the Android framework to get it to have better compatibility with other platforms.
• Improvements to URLConnection data encoding.
• Several JSONItem improvements.
• The Android compiler toolchain was updated to newer versions.
• Added Dependencies property to the Android advanced build settings. This can be used with Declares and Libraries to load any external dependencies they need. Put one dependency per line, an example would be: io.github.bitstorm:tinyzip-core:1.0.0
• Improved compatibility with Android 14.
• Many framework and compiler fixes.

Xojo 2024r1

The first release of 2024 continued the trend of rapid Android improvements.

• MobileApplication.Activated and Deactivating events now work on Android.
• Fixes and improves to several parts of the framework, including:
  • Introspection
  • SQLiteDatabase
  • JSONItem
  • URLConnection
• Many other framework and compiler fixes.

Don’t forgot to review the full release notes!

Xojo 2024r2

The latest Xojo release has plenty of improvements for Android. Some highlights include:

• MobileHTMLViewer field focus is now more reliable.
• TCPSocket is now available.
• Many Graphics properties are now available, including: ShadowBrush, LineCap, LineDash, LineDashOffset, LineJoin, Outline.
• Improved some compiler error messages.
• Many more framework and compiler fixes.

The full release notes are a fun summertime read.

What’s Next for Android?

As you all know by now, we don’t preannounce when things will appear in Xojo releases. We are continually working on adding features and improving Xojo for Android and when new things are ready, they appear in the next scheduled release. The best way to stay on top of what is going to be released soon is to help us with pre-release testing. Remember, if you have an active Xojo Pro license, you have access to a special pre-release section of the forum. If you have a Xojo Mobile license and woudl like to participate in testing please make a request.

With that said, some of the Android features in development include:

• ByRef support
• RegEx classes
• DatabaseConnection
• In-app purchasing support

Related Topics You Might Like

Android Design Extensions 2.5 for Xojo 2024r1

Android Improvements in Xojo 2023r3

Creating an Android Library with Kotlin for Use with Xojo

All Android related blog posts on the Xojo Blog

Paul learned to program in BASIC at age 13 and has programmed in more languages than he remembers, with Xojo being an obvious favorite. When not working on Xojo, you can find him talking about retrocomputing at Goto 10 and on Mastodon @lefebvre@hachyderm.io.

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