Explorer

The Explorer is the 'nerve center' of your application development process. It's a powerful, in-depth tool that lets you look at your entire database and access each element in the blink of an eye.

Master your application

The Explorer gives you a global vision of everything in your application and a fast way to access all its elements in just one place: tables, forms, methods, order lists, plug-ins, available components, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Create, delete, restore

The buttons and allow you to create or delete tables, forms, or methods.

The trash bin holds all deleted elements so that you can recover them if needed. It's one more level of security to keep you from having to waste time recovering from a mistake.

Preview and comment

A window pane lets you preview or comment on the selected object.

In preview mode, you can also select or copy the code of a method directly, without having to open the method editor.

Drag-and-drop anyplace

You can drag-and-drop objects from the Explorer to most editors in 4D.

Automatic renaming and prefixing

A new feature in the Explorer displays a list of objects in your database (methods or menus) referencing a selected project method. To rename a method, or add a prefix to the name, all you have to do is change the name once, and that change is automatically pushed out to every object in your database that uses the method. It's faster and less error-prone that manually renaming methods. You used to need 4D Insider to do this, but in 4D v11 SQL, it's built right into the Explorer.

This is a guaranteed time-saver that lets you put an end once and for all to the risk of errors when manually renaming!

Organize by group and re-use your elements

The Home page and its contextual menu gives you the option of organizing database objects (tables, methods, and forms) by functionality into folders. For example, you could group all objects used for billing into the same folder. This makes code maintenance much easier.

Even better, you can re-use this folder in another database using copy/paste or drag-and-dropping the folder!

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