Therefore Programming Interface 3.0

Zoom Window Out
Larger Text | Smaller Text
Hide Page Header
Show Expanding Text
Printable Version
Save Permalink URL

What's new in Therefore™ 2016

New feature: Forms

The new Therefore™ Forms feature is implemented as Therefore documents without files in combination with new options for displaying category fields and properties. To represent these new options in the API the new TheDisplayProperties class has been introduced. Every TheCategoryField object has a new property DisplayProperties with this type. The TheCategory class has the BackgroundColor property only.

The new image field type (see TheCategoryFieldType for reference) the TheCategoryField class has a new property ImageDocNo containing the document number of the image used. The image document has to be in the system category Templates with the template type set to "Index Dialog Image" to be valid.

New feature: Category Design

Categories and case definitions can now be created and changed with the API. Most properties of the classes TheCaseDefinition, TheCategory and TheCategoryField have been changed from read-only to read-write. For more detailed information take a look at the new methods and properties for these classes below.

To be able to add fields from referenced table to a case definition or category the TheReferencedTable and TheReferencedTableColumn classes have been introduced.

New feature: Query Dependent Fields

With the new TheDependentFieldsQuery class the content of referenced table fields and their dependent field can be queried. This class' functionality is similar to the data look-up dialog introduced with Therefore™ 2014.

Performance Enhancement Options for Documents

There are new performance enhancement options for operations with documents.

By default saving a document is automatically reloading the document again like the Viewer is doing it. If the document is not needed anymore after it has been saved this is not necessary. Because of this a new overload for TheDocument.Archive with a new parameter to specify whether the document should be reloaded or not has been introduced.

The new overloads for TheDocument.AddStream, TheDocument.AddStreamEx and TheDocument.AddStreamsEx have an additional parameter to specify if the file should be added as content file or not. Content files are not added to the compound file. Adding a file to the compound file needs some processing time. Usually it is better to add files to the compound file that are well suited to be compressed for faster data transfer though like text or Office documents though. Compressed image files like TIFF, JPEG and PNG are already compressed so that not adding them to the compound file can increase performance.

The API recognizes some of these formats and might automatically add a file as content file automatically without the need to set the content file parameter. But if the parameter is set to false (do not add as content file) the file will be added to the compound file.

In addition to the new option when adding a new file to the document there is a new overload for TheDocument.Retrieve with a new parameter to specify if content files should be retrieved separately or if they should be integrated to the compound file before the retrieve.
Retrieving compound files separately is faster but sometimes it might be necessary to have the compound file contain all files (e.g. when the complete compound file is sent to a user via email).

New Workflow Interface

ITheWorkflowAutomaticTask

Please note that the old workflow interfaces have been removed from the documentation and shouldn't be used anymore. They will stay compatible with Therefore™ 2016 and future versions unless stated otherwise.