Article
4D Write and 4D View to their Pro counterparts
Not a new version of the same plugin, but a different technology. That means two kinds of work, with very different risk profiles.
4D Write and 4D View were plugins. Their successors are not a new version of the same plugin but a different technology, with their own document model and their own way of being driven. That means two kinds of work: your code, and your documents.
The code
Every place your application creates, fills, formats or prints a document has to be rewritten. The logic usually stays the same — you still want a letter carrying a customer's details — but the way you assemble it differs.
This is predictable work. It can be counted: how many places, how many document types, how many templates. Which means it can be budgeted.
The documents and templates
This is where the unpredictability lives. Existing documents and templates rarely arrive intact on the other side. Layout shifts, tables break differently, embedded objects and calculated fields do not behave the same.
For a handful of templates that is an afternoon's work. For a company with dozens of letters, contracts and reports grown over years, it is a project in its own right — and it is usually the item most underestimated in a quotation.
Count first, then decide
Before you start, take an inventory:
- How many different templates exist, and which are still actually used? In practice a good share have been dead for years.
- Which are simple (text with merge fields) and which are complex (tables, calculations, conditional blocks)?
- Who maintains them today? If users edit templates themselves, that changes the approach entirely.
That inventory decides whether you convert or rebuild. For simple documents, conversion pays. For complex ones, rebuilding is often faster than repairing whatever the conversion made of them.
Do not underestimate the templates. The code can be counted and therefore estimated. The documents can only be estimated once somebody has looked at them one by one.
An intermediate step that often helps
You do not have to convert everything at once. Usually the move can be made per document type: invoices first, then letters, then reports. The application stays usable and the risk is spread over time.
That template inventory is part of our 4D assistance: count what is actually there first, and only then put a price on the conversion.