Discover all options to use Standard Actions
Some developers believe that automatic actions are for beginners. However they might have missed a lot of potential we added in the last years. Standard actions, such as First Record or color?value=red, can be assigned to a button in the user interface or by programming. The action can be assigned to a menu item, context menu, or invoked with a command. A benefit is that 4D also automatically handles the menu item or button deactivation whenever the action is not applicable (for instance, as if there is no next record).
And from 4D v16 R3, the list of standard actions is growing: over 100 new standard actions have been added for 4D Write Pro and Styled Text, allowing to build for instance a toolbar without writing a line of code!
Detailed analysis of your database structure
Did you know that you can retrieve very detailed information on a table, field, indexes, relation or even on the complete database structure? This kind of information is always very useful for analysis or introspection purposes. Of course, you could use the 4D Pack deprecated commands: _AP Get field infos and _AP Get table info. Another option is to use the SQL system tables.
None of them allows you to retrieve all information. So why use a plug-in or SQL when you could use a 4D command? The EXPORT STRUCTURE command returns the complete database structure definition in an XML tree. This command exists since 4D v14 R4.