You’ve built the app. Now you need to ship it — fast, clean, and licensed. With 4D 20 R10, you can automatically embed your deployment license into your application builds — no manual setup, no machine-specific paths. Built for OEM and 4D Desktop – Business Edition licenses, this feature relies on just one setting to make your build file portable, version-controlled, and shareable across machines. License checks now run before the build starts, the logs show which licenses were used, and your settings stay intact if anything goes wrong.
One simple tweak, and deployment becomes one less thing to worry about.

Automatically embed your deployment licenses

Starting with 4D 20 R10, if you have deployment licenses registered on your machine, 4D can now automatically include them in your built applications.
To make things even easier, we’ve redesigned the license section of the Build Application dialog. It now offers a clear set of options to help you choose the type of application you want to build.

Application without embedded license

This is the default option for new projects, when the BuildApp.4DSettings file doesn’t contain any license information and Evaluation mode is disabled.
With this option, the built application won’t include any license. You’ll need to register the appropriate licenses on the deployed machines, as explained in this blog post.

Evaluation application

This option lets you build evaluation applications, as described in this blog post.

Application with automatically embedded licenses

When you select this mode, 4D will automatically search your system’s Licenses folder for valid deployment licenses. The retrieved licenses are listed in the interface (refer to the documentation to check the license selection order). However, the license paths are not stored in the BuildApp.4DSettings file. Instead, a new boolean key — “BuildApp / Licenses / AutomaticLicenseIntegration” — has been introduced to enable this automatic integration.
With this setting, since no specific license path is defined in the file, the BuildApp.4DSettings file can be included in your version control repository or easily shared across multiple machines!
The automatic parameter has also been added to the Build4D component to support the same behavior: just define “License Automatic mode” in the “License” attribute of the settings object.

Application with defined embedded licenses

This mode mirrors the previous behavior of the build process. The built application will include the licenses explicitly defined in the BuildApp.4DSettings file.

A smoother process for developers

To further improve the developer experience, we’ve made several enhancements to the build process:

• License validity is now checked before the build starts, so you won’t have to wait until the end to discover any license-related issues. That’s a real time-saver.
• From the Build Application dialog, a new dialog now shows which targets were successfully generated at the end of the build. This information is also logged in the build log file, which now includes the licenses used.
• When the build throws errors, the Build Application dialog remains open to prevent losing your most recent settings.
• The Create deployment license command also benefits from the new automatic license integration.

We hope these improvements will save you time and make your deployment process even smoother.