Less than three months until the MBS Xojo Developer Conference and our Training Day. Time to end the early bird offer on 31st January.
So far we have attendees from 12 countries:
🇩🇪 Germany, 🇳🇱 Netherlands, 🇬🇧 United Kingdom, 🇨🇭 Switzerland, 🇺🇸 United States, 🇵🇱 Poland, 🇬🇷 Greece, 🇫🇷 France, 🇪🇸 Spain, 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇸🇪 Sweden and 🇮🇹 Italy.
The hotel has a few free rooms left. So if you like to join, please sign-up soon.
In this article I want to introduce you the new functionalities from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 26.0.
Some Excel files can only be opened with a password. To make it possible to work with password-protected Excel files with LibXL, we've added a new method SetPassword in the XLBookMBS class where you can set the password needed to open the file.
As you see, you simply set the password and then later you can call one of the Load methods:
Just three months until the MBS Xojo Developer Conference and our Training Day. The minimum number of attendees was reached in December, so the conference will take place. Please sign-up, book your flights and hotel nights.
The schedule is nearly complete. Please check the session list. We have eleven great speakers and look forward to the talks.
The early bird offer got extended until 31st January 2026, so you have another week to decide and sign-up. If you don't hear from us within a day or two, please email us.
We recently listed two sessions with David Cox:
| Auto Reports — run Reports in your Sleep Xojo is very useful for creating databases and reporting your data to the screen, a PDF, an email or a printer. Users often need to run these reports daily, weekly or monthly. But this can be a problem when staff are sick, on holidays, just too busy, we forget or when the number of reports gets too large. Auto Reports are normal Xojo reports where your Xojo application runs the reports themselves automatically based on a time or database trigger, then send the results to email or SMS with no human intervention. If you charge for your reports, you can have them delivered even when you are away from your computer, support more clients than you could manually manage and even have your invoices sent automatically. |
| Sparkler App — update Desktop or Web Apps to new Version Xojo is easily able to create Version 1.0 Desktop and Web Apps, downloadable from your web site. But how to they get notified of a new Version 1.1? What if the user downloaded the version for Intel or ARM or the 32-bit version, and they need to keep to this version? Sparkler is written in Xojo and allows your users to be informed when a new version becomes available, see the changes, download and install the new version for their individual App type, whether Desktop or Web, Intel or ARM or Universal, or 32/64-bit version from your web site. The Sparkler Admin application is available for Desktop, Web and iOS. All code is free and unlocked (needs MBS, needs GraffitiSuite for iOS). |
In Xojo you can store data in arrays. An array is a data structure with one or more dimensions, where you can store various data types. Arrays itself are objects, that hold the data as well as metadata like dimensions and allocation size.
When you declare an array variable, Xojo will reserve the memory for the variable (or property) and create the underlaying array object.
Internally this calls the CreateArray function in the framework and passes the size of 0 and one dimension. But if you assign nil, then the CreateArray call doesn't happen.
This will only allocate the variable, but not create a new array.
With the assignment to a second variable, we now have two variables pointing both to the same array (object). Like if you have two keys to one locker. When you pass the array to a method, it gets another reference, so the array is not copied. If the method then modifies the array, you see the changes through your references in the variables.
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Nickenich, Germany - (January 13th, 2026) -- Monkeybread Software today is pleased to announce MBS Xojo Plugins 26.0 for macOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin collection currently available for Xojo. MBS Xojo Plugins have been updated and now includes over 3000 classes and 83,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:
On macOS and iOS, you can use Apple’s Translation framework to perform fully local, on-device translations. Users must download the required languages in System Settings. Our Translation classes can then start a session with a selected language pair and perform translations directly within your Xojo applications.
We updated the Scintilla control to the current upstream library. This improves compatibility with macOS Tahoe and adds many new properties, constants, and methods.
The CADisplayLinkMBS class provides a timer object that allows your application to synchronize drawing operations with the display’s refresh rate. Our StoreKit2MBS module can now initiate refunds for in-app purchases. Use the RequestAgeRange method to ask for the user’s age range and conditionally enable adult-only functionality.
We added two new Saxon examples:
The XLBookMBS class now includes a SetPassword method, allowing you to open encrypted Excel workbooks by providing a password. LibXL 5.0.1 supports multiple hashing and encryption algorithms.
The JSONMBS class gained new properties to control the characters used for formatted JSON output, including configurable indentation. You can also generate multiple linked barcodes using the StructuredAppend parameter and export them as images.
We reduced the amount of debug information included in the libraries and merged several components. This reduces the total download size by more than 300 MB.
CURL can now display SFTP command paths in debug logging and uses Apple’s SecTrust framework to verify certificates. This replaces the older UseSystemCertificates method.
For NSURLRequestMBS and related classes, we added new properties to control cellular access, ultra-constrained networks, expensive networks, and constrained connections. This allows macOS and iOS to make better decisions about whether your application may use satellite or mobile data connections.
Finally we update the CURL library to version 8.18.0, DynaPDF to 4.0.102.302, GraphicsMagick to 1.3.46, lcms2 to 2.18, LibXL to 5.0.1, mongo-c-driver to 2.2.0, Scintilla to 5.5.8, SQLAPI to 5.4.1, Xcode to 26.1.1 and the Xojo SDK to version 2025r3.
See release notes for a complete list of changes.Download here
Recently LibXL 5.0 was released and we include this update in our upcoming MBS Plugins 16.0 for FileMaker and 26.0 for Xojo.
The new password feature was often requested and we add the matching password parameters to our Load functions, so you can pass it to the plugin.
LibXL is a powerful library to create, read, edit and write Excel documents in older and newer Excel file formats and without the need to install Microsoft Excel. It allows the developer to automate a lot of tasks related to Excel spreadsheets within your solution or application.
Learn more on our LibXL for FileMaker and LibXL for Xojo pages.
When you receive an electronic invoice in the formats ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, X-Rechnung or UBL, you may need to validate the XML file in your Xojo application. You certainly don't want a surprise later when you get a tax audit.
You can use our DynaPDF plugin functions to extract the XML from the ZUGFeRD invoice. Once you have the XML, you can do some automated validation. We leverage the XSL and XSD files coming with the ZUGFeRD 2.3 download. They provide a way to check both the structure with the XSD file as well as the content with the XSL file. The XSL file is based on the schematron file with all the business rules, but converted to a stylesheet for using it with the XSLT function in SaxonMBS module. While the schema check makes sure you have the right nodes in the right places, the business rules define what can go in a field and how fields are related.
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New in this prerelease of the 25.6 plugins:
New functions in documentation
Download Links: Download Mac dmg or Download Windows/Linux zip
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.
When you receive an electronic invoice in the formats ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, X-Rechnung or UBL, you may need to visualize the XML file in your Xojo application. You can use our DynaPDF classes to extract the XML from the ZUGFeRD invoice. Once you have the XML for one of the formats UBL or Cross Industry Invoice, you may want to convert it to HTML and show it in a HTMLviewer.
We leverage the XRechnung Visualization Transformators project from GitHub. This project has a couple of XML stylesheets to convert our invoices to HTML. For this they first convert the UBL or CII XML to an intermediate XML and finally convert that to XML with a second transformation. There is also an alternative output to produce a XML for Apache FOP to make it a PDF file.
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The January/February (24.1) issue of xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:New in this prerelease of the 25.6 plugins:
New functions in documentation
Download Links: Download Mac dmg or Download Windows/Linux zip
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.