In September 2009, we published a series of four articles on the 4D blog entitled “TimeStamp, my love”. It addressed a key subject for many developers: the management of timestamps and their role in data consistency.

More than sixteen years have passed since then, and it’s timely to review and update the content of this series.

Just as generic methods need to be revised with each new version in order to be optimized or removed, this principle can also be applied to articles dealing with general concepts.

Even if you’ve read, applied (we hope) and mastered the subject, we think this rereading will shed some additional light on the “timestamp” subject and on the use of 4D 21’s new functionalities, in particular the use of ORDA, classes and objects, all notions that weren’t topical at the time of the first publication.

This is the first in a series of 7 courses devoted to timestamps.
But beyond the subject itself, you’ll quickly discover that timestamps are also an excellent pedagogical pretext for exploring related notions essential to modern development with 4D :

• object-oriented design
• using classes
• class inheritance
• implementing a Singleton
• and, more broadly, methodology and rigor in code writing

So this series is not limited to a simple technical mechanism: it offers a more global reflection on the structuring of robust, maintainable and upgradeable code in recent versions of 4D.

This course is the indispensable foundation before moving on to the advanced implementations of the next courses in this series.