User preferences allow you to customise the look-and-feel of the user interface to accommodate different conventions for displaying fields and for colouring the screen display. User preferences are tied to usernames so that when a user logs on the right preferences are read from the system database.
The DP4 configuration file, USERDATA.SYS, stores the default user preferences for all users. On installation, the first time you run the USERDATA utility, the initial values for these preferences are copied into USERDATA.SYS from the executable file, USERDATA.EXE. You can subsequently change the default user preferences held in USERDATA.SYS by running the DP4 System Setup utility (DFSETUP) from the command line (not logged in under a username), as described in Changing the Default User Preferences
To restore the USERDATA.EXE preference values to USERDATA.SYS, run the USERDATA utility with the -RESET command tail. And, if doing this for Windows, include the -SAA command tail to impose the IBM SAA convention, fully described in Using the DP4 User Interface. In order to retain any customisation of the keyboard, set up with DFSETUP, also append the -SAMEKEY command tail.
User preferences for individuals are stored on the System database. To set these up for a user, log into the DP4 system menus as that user, and carry out the procedure given later in Changing a User's Preferences. The preferences are initially taken from userdata.sys, but you can change these as you like to conform to different user and user group conventions. For many preferences, you can choose Default to use the current USERDATA.SYS values. The following example illustrates the consequences of this.
Initially, the USERDATA.SYS "Selection" colour is "Blue/White"
Within their respective menus systems, user A specifies "Default" for "Selection" (which gives "Blue/White"), while user B explicitly specifies "Red/White"
By running DFSETUP from the command line, the USERDATA.SYS "Selection" colour is changed from "Blue/White" to "Black/White". This changes user A's "Selection" colour accordingly to "Black/White" because this is its new default. User B is unaffected by this modification to USERDATA.SYS, so his "Selection" colour remains as "Red/White"