Picture Management

Pictures used in 4D maintain their original format and type for both display and storage.

Native support

4D supports a number of picture formats natively (JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIF, and PICT) without requiring QuickTime. In addition, EMF is natively supported on Windows, and PDF on Mac.

No changes to the original

4D uses graphics without modifying their properties (transparency, shadowing, etc). The selected display format determines how the picture is displayed (truncated, centered, with or without scroll bars, etc) but the original graphic always remains unchanged.

Your image files can be used as static pictures, variables, or fields.

Save, import, and export your pictures

Pictures are stored “as is” regardless of how they are placed in fields (pasted, imported using a contextual menu, programmatically, etc.)

Automatic drag-and-drop

Drag-and-drop is managed automatically between objects – fields or variables – or between an object and an outside element (such as a document saved to disk). This feature can also be disabled, if preferred.

Images in context

You can associate a contextual menu to variables and Picture fields. This menu allows editing (cut, paste, copy), importing, exporting (where you can change the field type during export) and defining the display parameters (truncated, non-truncated, etc).

New commands for 4D v11 SQL

Image editing

You can do basic image manipulation in the Image Library using “operators”: resize, rotate, and other modifications. Pictures keep their original characteristics, only the way they are displayed actually changes. If you want to remove your changes, you can reset the graphics and revert to the original options.
Other operations (which cannot be reset) are also possible: reframing and dimming.

Combine prctures

This new command lets you combine pictures – picture1 and picture2 – to create a third, called pictureResult. The resulting image maintains all characteristics of the source pictures.

Type conversion

You can convert a picture from its original format to a new one (like from TIFF format to JPG).

Use your pictures

Just like fields and variables, pasted pictures (or dragged) in the Picture Library keep their original format. They can be transparent, shadowed, or used as is in forms, as static images (icons, logos) or as dynamic objects like buttons.

<< Menu Editor

Back to the feature list

Application Builder >>