This should be avoided. When developing a 4D plug-in which accesses a 4D Dialog built-in as a resource to the plug-in, you should not call your code from the User Environment for testing purposes. The code should always be tested within the Custom Menus Environment. If you do choose to run in the User Environment and try to call the API code to open a 4D Dialog (PA_OpenDialog), you will find that the dialog may not open correctly. What will generally happen is that a small dialog will appear which cannot be dismissed. In cases such as this, you will then need to 'force quit' 4D as the Dialog displayed is modal and you will not be able to access other 4D windows. It will appear as if 4D cannot find the Dialog resource in the F04D resource and simply opens an empty dialog. When developing a 4D database to test a plug-in that opens a dialog just create a menu item, which can then call the dialog in the Custom Menus Environment.