Unfortunately, I'm still not quite finished with the Elevate Web Builder 2 documentation, so the release is going to be delayed for a few more days. I will be uploading a new preview build today, however, so that everyone can start using the release candidate product. My apologies for the delay.

These are the new features in the release candidate:

• You can now bundle external images, fonts, etc. in addition to Javascript using the project manager. However, the web fonts are not being registered yet, so don't use them yet. I'll be adding this in before the final release.



• There's a new "Reset Interface" option in the form designer that allows you to reset the interface of a control to its default state. This is useful when switching out control interfaces.



• There is now support in the dataset transactions for fail-safe commits. You can retry commits that fail as many times as necessary. In addition, this means that commits are asynchronous also, and so you can use transaction wrappers around dataset update events without worrying about timing issues with the transactions, or trying to chain together event handlers.



• The TDatabase.Load method is now called LoadRows. This is due to the inclusion of a new TDatabase.LoadColumns method. The general idea here is to allow for more dynamic datasets from the back-end web server application.



• You can use user/password parameters for authentication instead of http headers. There's a new TDatabase.AuthenticationMethod method for specifying this (default is headers).



• The object persistence is done, meaning that you can now load/save TPersistent descendants to/from JSON using a couple of method calls.



• There's a new TViewport class whose instance is attached to the TApplication global class instance. You can use it to specify whether or not to show scrollbars in the browser viewport (separate X and Y overflow properties), as well as retrieving information about the browser viewport size.



• The TGrid control is done. It includes automatic fit for columns (right stretch) and the ability to turn on/off column headers and lines. It can now also have a transparent background, which you can see in action in the multimedia example (see below).



• The TAudio/TVideo controls are done.



• Double-taps are now being properly mapped to OnDblClick events for touch environments.



• There's a new standard interface that is more in line with the Windows8/Metro style. If you liked the old one, then you're going to have to wait a little while before I can update it for all of the new controls that have been completed since I switched out the old interfaces. I've also got a more rounded interface that will be published soon, also, and it uses Google's Open Sans font, by default.



• There are new clElevate* colors that represent a default color scheme that is used in the default standard interface. It contains 3 shades of black, gray, blue, orange, and green, as well as a gray background fill color.



• The TEWBDatabaseAdapter component for Delphi now includes a HandleRequest method that will take an incoming TServerRequest from an EWB server module and handle all of the messy details of processing the request and generating a response. In addition, there are now new TEWBDatabaseAdapter.OnAuthenticateUser and TEWBDataSetAdapter.OnFilterRows events that allow you to automate authentication and filtering of datasets. The TEWBDatabaseAdapter now also handles URL user/password authentication (see above).



• There are 3 new sample projects, one for multimedia, one for layout properties, and one for object persistence (see above).



• There are quite a few little bug fixes and minor changes to the interfaces. If you've modified/customized the interfaces at all for your projects, then you may have to adjust your modifications to accommodate some of these changes.

If you encounter a bug with the release candidate, please report it, but don't necessarily expect a fix before the actual release. If it's anything more than a very simple fix, I'll probably delay it until after the release. I'm planning on doing a quick minor release anyways in order to clean up any leftover issues that needs to be addressed.

If you don't see a particular feature/control property, method, or event, then it won't be in the initial release. Just submit an enhancement request and I'll work it in ASAP.

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Tags: Elevate Web Builder 2

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