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.
4D View Pro – Variable Row Height in Listbox
Displaying a list where the line height would exactly fit the content is a very common need. 4D View Pro is including a new feature so that you can now control the height of each row independently in a listbox to make it fit to its content. To know more about 4D View Pro, check out this blog post.
There are actually now two ways to define the row height in a listbox:
- using new dedicated commands
- using a new control array
Listbox – columns AUTO resizing !
4D v16 includes a new feature providing your end-user great freedom and flexibility at the interface level when using list boxes. The constraints defined for each column are now fully applied and respected when the list box they belong to is resized.
Execute action upon listbox column resizing
The event On Column Resize is now triggered “live” during the resizing of the list boxes as long as the user modifies the column widths (previously, it was generated only once, at the end of the resizing).
Thanks to this feature, 4D programmers will have the opportunity to create live and responsive interfaces based on the actual width of columns!
Use Unicode for texts in forms
In 4D v16 the texts for all the form objects (static texts, buttons, check boxes, etc…) will be stored in Unicode, allowing you to use characters from different languages directly in the form editor.
Especially for Asian or Eastern European languages this will ease the development process.
Contact us
Got a question, suggestion or just want to get in touch with the 4D bloggers? Drop us a line!
* Your privacy is very important to us. Please click here to view our Policy