18. Overview of 4GL : How You Can Use 4GL
 
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How You Can Use 4GL
You can use 4GL with ABF or Vision to customize your applications. For an overview of what you can do, see How the Tools and 4GL Work Together in Overview of Tools and Languages.
In general, use 4GL code to implement menu operations, manipulate data in the database, and control the user's movement among the frames and procedures of an application. With 4GL, you can create entry frames and develop customized frames. You can control the sequence of frames in an application as a whole and fine‑tune operations such as cursor placement and field validation in a single frame.
You can use 4GL statements to:
Call other frames, procedures, Ingres user interfaces, or the operating system
Perform functions such as clearing the screen, displaying error messages, or causing the terminal to beep
Control what happens when the user chooses a menu operation, presses a specific key, or tries to leave a particular field. You can also specify initialization, time-out, and database event activations. See Frame Activations.
4GL provides flexibility in the way you handle data in an application. You can:
Allow for runtime data input
Specify operations for querying and updating the database
Carry out multi-row queries with submenus
Do conditional processing, such as moving from field to field depending on the application user's data entry
Perform calculations on items in the frame, whether displayed in the window or not, and pass the results to another frame