4D provides users with certain standard access privileges and certain powers. Once a users and groups system has been initiated, these standard privileges take effect.

The most powerful user is named Designer. The Designer has control over the design of the database. The Designer can create users and groups, assign access privileges to groups, and use the Design environment. No aspect of the database is closed to the Designer.

After the Designer, the next most powerful user is the Administrator, who is usually given the task of managing the access system. When the Users page of the tool box is first opened, both the Designer and Administrator appear in the list of users. At this point, the Administrator is just a regular user with no special access privileges, in particular if access to the Design mode is restricted. To be able to use the access system, the Administrator must be given special access privileges. For information about this, see "Access for maintenance" in Ensuring system maintenance. The Administrator is the only user with the ability to save and load groups. For information about saving and loading groups as the Administrator, see Loading and saving groups.

The Administrator’s access to other parts of the database is limited by group membership — the Administrator must be part of one or more groups to have access privileges in the database. The Administrator is placed in every new group, but you can remove the Administrator’s name from any group.

In the user management dialog box, the icons of the Designer and Administrator are displayed in red and green respectively:

• Designer icon:
• Administrator icon:

You can rename the Designer and Administrator users but their icons cannot be changed. 

You can distinguish between users and groups created by the Designer and Administrator by the color of their icons:

• Icons for groups created by the Designer are red and those created by the Administrator are green.
• Icons for users created by the Designer are blue whereas those created by the Administrator are green.

The group owner can change the default name at any time.

The Designer and Administrator can each create up to 16,000 groups and 16,000 users.

In binary databases, the IDs of users and groups are related to their creator. The following ranges are used:

Note: In project databases, user and group IDs are dynamically allocated without specific range, except for the Designer and Administrators IDs (always 1 and 2).