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. The EMF format is also supported for Windows, as is the PDF format for Macintosh.

Alteration-free display

4D displays pictures without modifying their properties (transparency, shadowing, etc.) The display format determines how the picture is displayed (truncated, centered, with or without scroll bars, etc.) but never modifies the actual picture.

Pictures can be used indifferently with 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.)

Automatically drag and drop

Drag-and-drop is managed automatically (this feature can be disabled) between objects – fields or variables – or between an object and an outside element (a document saved to disk).

Contextual menu

A contextual menu can now be associated with variables and Picture fields. It allows editing (copy, paste, cut), 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

Transform your pictures

You can perform a number of tasks on pictures using “operators”: resize, mirror, translate, etc. Pictures keep their original characteristics, only the way they are displayed actually changes. These operations can be cancelled using the “Reset” operator.
Other operations (which cannot be cancelled) are also possible: reframing and dimming.

Combine your pictures

This new command allows combining pictures – picture1 and picture2 – in operator mode to create a third called pictureResult. The picture result is a composed type and maintains all characteristics of the source pictures.

Convert your pictures

You can convert a picture from its original format to a new type (for example, 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, etc. and can be used as is in forms as a static picture (icon, logo, etc.) or even within a dynamic object; for example, as buttons.

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