New Features

Introducing Alpha Five Version 8

Why is everyone so excited about the latest version of our award-winning database software? A visual overhaul, along with dramatic improvements in speed, security and connectivity, empower you to customize solutions for your data — quicker and easier than ever before.

Speed

Alpha Five Version 8 is now faster than ever. Launch the software, open databases and switch between tasks in a fraction of the time used by earlier versions.

Browse

The Browse has a completely new look. We've included new graphics, columns, buttons, programmable events and much more to make your applications polished and professional.

SQL Connectivity

Seamlessly extend the features and functions you are familiar with in Alpha Five to back-end SQL databases.

Web Security Framework

Alpha Five Version 8 includes a complete security framework for creating secure web applications without coding, allowing you to apply permissions to projects and resources for users and groups.

More

Want to learn more about the great new features in Alpha Five Version 8? Use the links at left for detailed descriptions of our new look and feel, Action Scripting, Xdialog and Xbasic improvements, Dockable Action Panels, our new CSS editor and much, much more!

Desktop Features

• Speed improvements in all areas, including program load time.
• Great new look - includes five different "themes".
• Dockable "Action Panels" for added productivity and convenience when working in layout editors, the script editor and the HTML editor. Action Panels give you single click access to all of your different tools (such as the toolbox, field drag/drop list etc.) and they conveniently slide out of view when you don't need them to give you more screen real-estate.
• Major improvements in the field drag/drop list and summary field genie make designing layouts much easier.
• New appearance options for buttons, frames and browses give these controls a modern new look.
• Better looking forms.
• Gradient backgrounds supported for most control types, including form backgrounds - gives your forms an ultra-modern look. Over 20 different gradient styles included.
• Powerful new color picker lets you easily set custom colors for any object on a layout. The color picker lets you easily pick different colors in a "theme" to help you select complementary colors.
• Automatic browse "green banding" - different color backgrounds for alternate rows.
• Place buttons and images in Browse cells - make the selection of what image to show data-driven.
• Place images in browse column headings.
• Multi-line browse column headings.
• Define events on browse column headings - when the user clicks on a browse column, execute any Xbasic code that you want.
• Enable sorting when a user clicks on a browse column heading.
• Several new actions in Action Scripting.
• Powerful new Xdialog features including gradient backgrounds on dialogs, new Property Grid control, new tab control, drop-down button controls, improved tree control and much more.
• Hundreds of improvements to Xbasic.
• Printing report layouts with ActiveX controls is now supported (this means you can now print graphs in reports using the bundled SimpleChart ActiveX control).
• Single-click import of Access and Excel databases (from the File/Open menu).
• SSL and TLS Support in Email and in XBasic - including powerful new encryption features.
• Built-in functions for USPS, FedEx and UPS shipment tracking.

Web Features

• Complete Security Framework for creating secure web applications without coding.
• "Group" based security - security settings are made for different groups and logged in users are assigned to groups.
• New "Login" component makes it easy to build login pages without having to write code.
• More control over the layout of components - no longer limited to a rigid tabular structure.
• New "Maintenance Component" for re-indexing and packing .dbf tables on the server.
• Dialog component has client-side calculated fields - e.g. enter a quantity and have the total display without having to do a "round trip" to the server.
• Dialog component has client-side show/hide and enable/disable rules to automatically show/hide or enable/disable controls based on data the user enters into the form.
• Grid component supports "arguments" which can be used in filter expressions."Arguments" can be automatically bound to session or page variables, or to cookies. This makes it easy to create pages with filtered grids where the filter expression is based on values in session, page or cookie variables without the need for any Xbasic programming.
• Flexible new builder for editing and creating CSS style sheets.
• Improved HTML editor with tabs for fast switching between documents.

Features for Working with SQL Databases

• Connectivity to SQL Databases.
• Alpha Data Access Objects (AlphaDAO) -a robust set of high level XBasic objects that you can program to build sophisticated applications against SQL data.
• The SQL Query Genie - interactive two-way tool that makes it easy to build and edit complex SQL queries - a great tool for learning SQL query syntax.
• Enterprise Report Builder - use the full power of the Alpha Five report writer to painlessly create reports against any SQL database.
• Universal SQL Database Explorer - powerful "tree structured" tool that makes it easy to explore, report on and manipulate data in SQL databases.
• SQL Command window - execute SQL commands against any SQL database.
• "Passive-Link" tables - easily refreshed snapshots of SQL data that are stored as standard Alpha Five tables.
• Portable SQL - bridges the differences in syntax between the different variants of SQL.
• AlphaDAO Import Genie - Powerful new tool for importing data from SQL databases - offers many enhancements over the ADO Import genie in Alpha Five version 7.