Add an hyperlink to your company logo in 4D Write Pro
A less well known usage of 4D Write Pro product is the production of HTML emails. In fact you can create a 4D Write Pro document including 4D expressions, text and images, then modify the document, paragraph or text properties and send it by email. In this context, a very common need is to add a link to a picture, e.g. your company logo.
4D Write Pro has been enhanced with 4D v16 R4 so that hyperlinks can now been added to text and/or pictures. Setting a link to your company logo or company name is now as easy as styling some text to bold.
Create your own contextual menu for 4D Write Pro
4D gives you new possibilities to customize your 4D Write Pro user interface to make it perfectly fit your business application. Instead of using the default 4D Write Pro contextual menu, which is so detailed that it could become unpleasant to use, the 4D developer can create its own contextual menu, with the exact list of actions that he wants to provide.
More standard actions for Styled Text areas
You want to quickly create a toolbar for your Styled text areas. You want to change the font of the text or compute/freeze 4D Expressions without writing a line of code. It is possible using the new standard actions for Styled Text areas.
Just associate a standard action to each button object and 4D will handle everything automatically: action triggering but also the button activation or deactivation if the action is not available in the current context.
Merge your windows into tabs on macOS Sierra
Thanks to macOS Sierra, applications now have to opportunity to use tabbed windows instead of multiple windows. From 4D v16 R3, 4D Developer Edition 64-bit can take advantage of this Apple’s new feature for the design environment.
The type of windows that can be tabbed are Methods and Form Editors windows. Other windows as explorer or tools for instance remain separate.
As in every application based on tab windows:
- each tab can be moved to a new window by dragging the tab out of the tab bar.
- each tab can be moved to another existing window.
Create your own interface for 4D Write Pro
You want to quickly create a menu bar to manage your 4D Write Pro areas? You want to create your own contextual menu for your end-users ? You would like to create a color mosaic to change the document background? So this feature is made for you – and better, you do not even need to write a single line of code…
We added standard actions to handle 4D Write Pro areas. They can be defined at design phase or by programming. More than 80+ actions are available and to name just some of them: Font style (bold, italic, underline), Font color, Background color, Text alignment (left, center, right, justify…), Borders (style, color, width, radius…), Spellchecker actions…
Something important to notice, when assigned to interface objects, standard actions automatically handle the activation/disabling of the object depending on the context. Easy!
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!
New info available in MSC dialog
If you are using a huge database with a lot of data, you should be very familiar with the 4D MSC dialog. The Maintenance and Security Center contains all the tools needed for information, verification, analysis, maintenance, backup & compacting of data and structure files.
Based on recent feedback from some of our users, we have enhanced this dialog in three ways:
- A link to the path of the log file has been added
- New global information on the data is accessible
- Information about tables are now available in both maintenance and standard modes
Improvement of Find in Design dialog
Find in design dialog has been upgraded to offer a more user-friendly design as well as 2 new features that will improve the user experience : a new stop button allowing to stop the ongoing search and a new option to filter your search results.
Customize highlight color upon listbox row selection
A new step is reached to provide our developers with a fully customizable listbox object, entirely adaptable to user need. A new option is available in the listboxes that will allow to improve final interfaces: this option is called “Hide selection highlight”.
With just one click this option can be activated. Once activated, the system highlight will be completely invisible.
4D Write Pro – Horizontal Ruler
With 4D v16 R2 you can display a graphical horizontal ruler at the top of the 4D Write Pro area ! Thanks to this horizontal ruler, the text can be easily formatted.
Prior to the existence of this graphic ruler, tabulations could only be managed by programming or using the 4D Write Pro interface widget. From now (4D v16 R2 and above), when the ruler is displayed (this is optional) the final user will have the opportunity to manage margins and tabulations easily and graphically.
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