New Functionality in the Application Builder

•	A new Application Builder page is available in the Preferences dialog box. It contains a new preference to limit the maximum number of open editors. The Desktop windows section, previously located under General, has also been moved to the Application Builder page.

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There is now support for switching units in applications. The new Unit Set node under Declarations makes it possible to specify a list of values and display names, where each value represents a specific unit in a list of units. The Unit Set also has a table of different unit lists, and each list contains units with the same dimension. The Input Field and Slider form objects can use a specific unit list of a unit set to specify the display unit of the form object.

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You can now create shortcuts to form objects and menu, ribbon, and toolbar items. In the Settings windows for such objects, a Create Shortcut button is available. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K to create a shortcut declaration to the currently selected form object or menu item. Created shortcuts appear in the Shortcuts node under Declarations in the Application Builder tree. Shortcuts are automatically updated when objects are renamed, moved, copied, and duplicated. Shortcuts are available in application method code as read-only Java® variables.

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Most form objects and items for menus, ribbons, and toolbars have two new settings: Visible and Enabled. These settings determine the initial visibility and enabled states of a form object or item. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to use a startup event and the a setFormObjectEnabled and setFormObjectVisible methods to control the initial visibility and enabled states.

•	An About Dialog section has been added to the Main Window node’s Settings window. You can now customize the placement of the open About Application dialog action, choose to hide the default COMSOL Server information, and add a customized about text in the dialog box.

•	When creating a command sequence for Animations with Target set to Player, an additional argument can now specify which graphics to draw the animation in.

•	Events can now use explicit selections as a trigger source. The enlisted events are triggered when the selected entities of the source selection changes.

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Everything in methods and command sequences that affect the state of form objects now apply immediately and not after the method or command sequence has finished. It is possible to change a text label or switch a card in a card stack in a method and see the effect immediately, even if the method continues with some lengthy operation, such as solving. The only exception to this is generating a report. It is still done after the method or command sequence has finished. As a side effect, the updateGraphics method is now obsolete, and the corresponding command for command sequences is no longer available.

Improvements to the Form Editor

•	A new Hyperlink form object can be used for adding hyperlinks to an app.

•	A new Video form object can be used to show a video of an embedded video file in apps.

•	When showing a selection in a Graphics form object, the toolbar now includes the following buttons: Zoom to Selection, Select Box, and Deselect Box.

•	The Progress Bar now has a setting to close dialog forms when the cancel button is clicked.

•	Similar to the current Main Menu, Toolbar and Ribbon items, a new Toggle item is available, with toggle functionality.

•	The minimum and maximum limits for Input Fields and Slider objects can now support global parameters in their expression. They also dynamically change when the parameter changes.

•	Graphics form objects have a new Zoom to extents on first plot setting option. This setting makes the first plot that appears in the graphics canvas zoom to extents. This happens either when the app starts, or if the canvas is empty initially when something is plotted the first time.

•	Font sizes assigned to form objects are now given in points (pt) and not pixels (px).

Improvements to the Method Editor and Application Language

•	The form objects can now be modified from methods (see the Application Programming Guide for more information).

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A new document, the Application Programming Guide, available as a PDF, explains the structure and API for programming methods in the Application Builder and provides comprehensive information about available properties for form objects and other parts of the Application Builder that you can access from methods.

•	There are new shortcut keys for brackets in code. Ctrl+M will jump the caret between matching brackets (parenthesis, square brackets, or curly braces) and Ctrl+Shift+M will additionally select the entire bracket range.

•	A toString method with the option to remove trailing zeros has been added.

•	A getLicenseNumber method retrieves the license number for the current session as a string.