This document covers the following topics:
Beside this product documentation, additional product information is available at the following places:
The Knowledge Center at https://empower.softwareag.com/ (for registered users only).
The Natural for Ajax discussion forum at http://tech.forums.softwareag.com/techjforum/forums/list.page.
For detailed information on the supported operating systems, application servers, web containers, web browsers, and other prerequisites, see System Requirements.
This section describes new features and enhancements in Natural for Ajax which have been added after the release of Natural or Ajax Version 8.2.7.
The NATPAGE control now
supports the new property natkcheck. This property
helps to avoid ambiguous variable names when a check for keywords is performed
with the Natural profile parameter KCHECK.
It is now possible to start applications with the HTTP method
POST. With previous versions, it was only possible to use the HTTP
method GET. See Starting a Natural Application with a
URL in Client Configuration.
With Natural for Ajax, it is now possible to authenticate against a Software AG IAF server. See Using Integrated Authentication Framework (IAF) in Client Configuration.
A default error handling servlet is now available. See Customizing Error Pages in Client Configuration.
If your Natural program only allows Latin upper-case characters (for
example, if you are using the Hebrew codepage CP803), you can now set the
parameter natuppercase="true" in the
cisconfig.xml file. In this case, the built-in events are
generated in upper case, and URLs to Natural for Ajax pages are handled
correctly even if they are specified completely in upper case. See also
Code Pages.
The new built-in event nat:popup.end can now be raised when
the user closes a pop-up window with the Close button in the upper right corner
of the pop-up window. To activate this new built-in event, the new property
popupendmethod of the
NATPAGE control has to be set to
"true". For more information, see
Built-in
Events and User-defined Events.
The TEXT control now supports
the new properties bgcolorprop and
fgcolorprop which can be used to set the control's
background color and foreground color.
The XCIPOPUPMENU
control now supports the new property
withinactivenodes which can be used to disable
single context menu items. The default value is
"false". If set to
"true", the adapter is generated with an additional
INACTIVE field. By default, the value of the INACTIVE
field is "false". If you set it to
"true", the corresponding menu item is shown as
inactive, that is, it is greyed out and cannot be selected.
The GOOGLEMAP control now supports the Google Maps JavaScript API v3. An API key is not needed any more, but when used in production, an API key should be used.
You can now generate HTML pages using the command line (either single pages or entire projects). An Ant file named generate.xml is available for this purpose. You can find it in the support/ant directory of the product CD. For more information, see Generating HTML Pages Using the Command Line.
Due to changes and corrections in the right-to-left (RTL) handling of
character-based I/O (Natural statements INPUT, WRITE,
DISPLAY etc.), the following prerequisites must be met to run RTL
applications correctly that use these statements: Natural for Ajax Version
8.3.3 requires Natural Version 8.3.2 or above on Linux, UNIX or Windows or
Natural Version 8.2.4 or above on mainframes, and vice versa.
Natural for Ajax now supports Internet Explorer 11. However, with the current version of Natural for Ajax, applications running in RTL (right-to-left) mode cannot be executed under Internet Explorer 11.
The ROWTABLEAREA3 control is used to bind a two-dimensional Natural array to a grid. This grid separates the data structure for the business data from the data structure for the rendering data.
With the NJX:REQUESTCONTEXT control, the Natural application can access context information regarding the request.
The TEXT control now supports
the new properties maxrows,
maxrowsprop,
maxrowlength and
maxrowlengthprop which can be used to limit the
number of rows and the length of the rows.
This type of support was already available with Natural for Ajax Version 8.3.2. Due to an early documentation deadline, this fact could not be announced in the Release Notes for version 8.3.2.
The elements LEFT and TOP of the
NJX:XCIOPENPOPUP control
are now also supported for page pop-ups. These elements were previously only
supported for browser pop-ups.
It was not possible to introduce this feature without producing the
following incompatibility as compared with previous handling of page pop-ups:
In order to open a centered page pop-up, the elements LEFT and
TOP need to be set to -1. If LEFT and
TOP are set to 0, the page pop-up is opened in the upper left
corner of the browser output area.
Previous versions contained an inconsistency in the focus handling during flush events. When a flush event was specified for a FIELD and the user moved the focus away from that FIELD, the following happened while the flush method was executed:
If alwaysflush="false" (default) was defined for the
FIELD, the Natural system variable *CURS-FIELD
contained the value of the Natural system function POS for the
FIELD that lost the focus.
On the other hand, if alwaysflush="true" was defined for
the FIELD, the Natural system variable *CURS-FIELD
contained the value of the Natural system function POS for the
FIELD that received the focus.
This inconsistency has been removed. Now when the user moves the focus
away from one input control to another,
*CURS-FIELD contains during the flush event the
POS value of the input control that received the focus.
This allows an application to identify both the input control that lost the
focus (by means of the flush event) and the input control that received the
focus (by means of *CURS-FIELD).
Note:
If an application relies on *CURS-FIELD
containing the POS value of the input control that lost
the focus, it can achieve this behavior by setting the parameter
flushreceivespreviousfocused="true" in the configuration file
cisconfig.xml.
With the configuration tool, it is now possible to define the filler character that is to be removed from the input fields of an application. Trailing filler characters will be removed from the input fields, and leading filler characters will be replaced with blanks. See Editing a Session in the Client Configuration documentation.
JBoss Application Server 5.1 and Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 are no longer supported. Support of subsequent versions of Oracle GlassFish is not planned.
See also Supported Application Servers.
The ROWTABAREA and
COLTABAREA controls now support the new properties
disabledprop1 through
disabledprop16 which can be used to dynamically
disable and enable tabs from within a Natural application at runtime.
In addition, the ROWTABAREA and COLTABAREA controls now support the following new properties which can be used to dynamically set the style per tab at runtime:
tabselectedstyleprop1 through
tabselectedstyleprop16
tabunselectedstyleprop1 through
tabunselectedstyleprop16
tabdisabledstyleprop1 through
tabdisabledstyleprop16
For TEXTOUT controls, the count of rendered decimal digits now matches the decimal digits specified in the bound Natural data type.
Natural for Ajax now uses the Software AG Installer to copy the distributables for the supported application servers and web containers to your machine. You can then install them on your application server or web container as usual. For more information, see Installation.
The following application servers are now supported:
WildFly 8 (this is the new name for JBoss Application
Server)
Apache Tomcat 8
See also Supported Application Servers.
The following applications servers will no longer be supported in future versions:
JBoss Application Server 6
IBM WebSphere Application Server 7 and 8.0
Apache Tomcat 6
While typing, it is now possible to select a value from a pre-populated list of values. With the new AUTOCOMPLETE control, you can add this functionality to a FIELD control.
For FIELD controls, it is now possible to customize the keys which open
the pop-up and/or combo box for the value help. The new parameter
valuehelpkeys is supported in the
cisconfig.xml configuration file. You specify the keys in
the same way as hot keys. Example:
valuehelpkeys = "ctrl-65;ctrl-alt-66"
See also Configuration in the Application Designer documentation.
A new style sheet, natural_mapeditor.css, is available. If you would like to see the same colors in the output window as in the map editor, you can use this new style sheet instead of the default style sheet natural.css. See also Name and Location of the Style Sheets in the Client Configuration documentation.
With Internet Explorer 11, Firefox and Chrome, Natural for Ajax applications now run in standards mode in the browsers. This mode supports HTML5 and CSS3. For information on how to upgrade your applications and environments, see Browser Standards Mode and HTML5.
With Internet Explorer 10, Natural for Ajax applications now run in the Internet Explorer 10 quirks mode, which already supports many HTML5 and CSS3 features.
A new chapter Test Automation of Natural for Ajax Applications is now available. It explains how to use stable identifiers for automated tests.
A new chapter Styling Grids is now available. It provides hints on the most frequent customizations of grids.