If you’ve ever called Genie Support and been asked to ‘delete 4D preferences’ you might have felt a rush of fear; you don’t want to go about deleting something important! It’s understandable for that to be your first reaction, given that you’re dealing with health and financial data. The process of deleting 4D preferences need not be daunting and isn’t as serious as you might think, plus it’s a helpful and simple way to fix many of the strange behaviours you may encounter in Genie.
What are 4D Preferences?
As you might already know, the Genie program is written using the programming language ‘4D’. When we refer to ‘4D preferences’, we are talking about cached data which serves as ‘background information’ for the Genie program on your machine. These are temporary files that Genie creates to dictate certain behaviour in Genie. When you delete these files, a fresh copy is created on reopening the Genie program, based on the data hosted on the Server.
As the files you are deleting are preference files only, deleting these will not affect your Genie data (including your User, Printing, or Practice preferences) which is stored in a file called ‘Genie.4DD’ on your server machine. And by making sure you delete only the files instructed in this article, you will not delete files related to other programs.
In summary, you can think of deleting your 4D preferences as ‘refreshing’ your Genie settings.
Before you begin
Before you make use of this handy troubleshooting trick, you will want to consider a few things:
Is the behaviour you are experiencing isolated to one machine?
If you’ve noticed something a bit odd in Genie, one of the first questions Genie Support would ask you is whether this is occurring on all machines or just yours. If this behaviour is occurring on all machines, you would want to investigate it a bit further. For example, has something changed recently with your network or has your Genie version just been updated?
If the strange behaviour is only occurring on one or two machines we may want to employ the deletion of 4D preferences method as this often resolves those odd behaviours that are isolated to individual machines.
Do you have work open in Genie that you need to save?
As the Genie program is accessing the 4D preferences while it is running, all instances of Genie on the machine must first be closed down before deleting these. As such, save your work before you begin taking steps to delete 4D preferences.
What operating system version are you using?
Manually deleting 4D Preferences requires you to navigate to a location on your computer. These locations differ between Mac and Windows machines and between different versions of the Windows operating system. We will look at the ways you can delete 4D preferences in the section below.
Are you running Genie Server as a Service?
If you need to delete the 4D preferences on the Genie Server machine and you run the Genie Server as a Service, once you have followed the steps below you'll need to start the Genie Server as an application to allow these preferences to be re-built. Once this is done, you can quit the Genie Server application and start the service again.
Automatically delete 4D preferences
Are you using Genie v8.9.2 or above?
Using the Delete 4D Preferences button is a quick and easy way to automatically refresh your Genie preferences.
To delete your 4D preferences navigate to File > Maintenance and Reports and select the Delete 4D Preferences button. You will then receive a prompt advising you that 'The program will now quit and restart itself', to which you must click OK to proceed.
As Genie restarts, a number of windows pop up on your screen referencing the files that Genie is rebuilding. After this has finished, Genie should reopen to the login window.
Are you using Genie v8.9.1 or below?
The button for deleting 4D preferences was made more comprehensive as of Genie v8.9.2, so if you are using Genie v8.9.1 or below, we would recommend that you delete your 4D preferences manually, using the steps below.
Manually deleting 4D preferences
The process for deleting the 4D Preferences folders varies depending on the operating system in use.
Note: Please ensure all instances of Genie on your computer are closed before attempting to manually delete 4D preferences.
Windows
1. Click on the Windows key on your keyboard and type ‘run’. Alternatively, go to the Start menu and type 'run' in the search box, then press Enter. (If you don't have a search box, click the Run option in the Start menu)
2. Enter the following in the Run window: appdata
3. Press OK. A File Explorer window should open to the AppData folder on your computer
4. Delete any folders found at the following locations that contain ‘4D’ or ‘Genie’ in their names:
* AppData > Local
* AppData > Local > Temp
* AppData > Roaming
Macintosh
1. Click the 
Finder icon on your dock to open a Finder window
2. In the sidebar on the left, click your 
home folder
3. Open the 
'Library' folder. (If Library isn't appearing in your list hold down the Option key on your keyboard then click on Finder > Go. The Library option should appear and you can double click on this to open it)
4. Delete any folders found at the following locations that contain ‘4D’ or ‘Genie’ in their names:
* Library > Application Support
* Library > Caches
* Library > Preferences
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