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 OS/400 Release Level Notice and Survey
As part of our ongoing development strategy and planning efforts, ExcelSystems and BCD are
scheduling future iSeries system upgrades and OS/400 release level support. Our product
line currently requires a minimum OS/400 release level of V4R4 or V4R5. IBM discontinued support
for V4R5 as of December 31, 2002. Support for V5R1 is scheduled to end September 30, 2005.
As our products continue to evolve and new products are introduced it is our intention to
keep in step with IBM OS/400 release levels. This allows us to develop using current technology
and to make this technology available to you in our product family. As part of our upgrade strategy we will be upgrading our primary development iSeries to an i5 server running V5R3. Our secondary server
and test platform will remain at V5R1. As of September 1, 2004 the minimum release level supported
for the BCD suite of products will be V5R1.
In our efforts to gauge the impact of these changes, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take a minute of your time to let us know what your current OS/400 release level is. To do so, visit the Client OS/400 Release Level Survey page.
Nexus 2 Reference and User Guides
Nexus 2
Reference and
User Guides are now complete and available for download (in PDF format) from our web site, at the Nexus Home Page.
The Nexus Reference Guide is intended for site administrators and the programmers involved in setting up and configuring Nexus at your site. The User Guide is intended for distribution to everyone who may be logging into Nexus and needs instructions on how to customize their personal settings, understand the structure of the Nexus site, or how to use the portlets shipped with the product (including the Calendar, Terminal Emulation, ToDo List and Personal Link portlets).
If you have any questions about the Nexus documentation, please contact technical support.
Nexus Case Study at Covenant Transport
In other Nexus news, Midrange Computing published an article by
Bob Gast, an Industry Consultant. The article describes a Nexus Case Study at Covenant Transport, Inc. It is posted online at the MC MAG | Online web site. Covenant Transport, Inc. recently acquired Nexus for free (under BCD's current promotion), and is using it to host the web applications they have been developing, to facilitate access for their several hundred users.
Here are some excerpts from the Case Study:
"Eric Whitton, Manager of Systems and Technology for Covenant Transport, Inc., recently bought the Nexus Portal from Business Computer Design, and it is fast becoming the dashboard for all the company's desktops. Trucking giant Covenant Transport reported $582.5 million in sales last year and covered over 100 million miles of highway with 3,800 tractors and almost 8,000 trailers.... With 728 users on an iSeries model 825 who were increasingly given access to new browser-based applications, Whitton sought easier ways to perform searches for documents that pertained to customer shipments and to access growing layers of Web-based, Windows, and iSeries programs.... As the momentum behind the portal project increased, IBM was invited to make a presentation on its portal products. At the end of IBM's presentation, Whitton realized, "I couldn't sell it to management because it was going to cost a lot of money. After licenses, maintenance, training, and other costs, I could have spent a quarter of a million dollars."
In one of the weekly staff meetings, a programmer brought in an ad for BCD's Nexus portal and showed it to Whitton. In stark contrast to the pricing of IBM's solution, the ad declared that Nexus, normally priced at $12,000, was free through a special promotion-- only the annual software maintenance fee was due. "The free thing definitely caught our attention. To me, that said, 'You are not taking a chance; you might as well get this thing and try it.' "
At Covenant Transport, Nexus improves the presentation of information, integrates disparate business applications, facilitates collaboration between workers within departments and between departments, and simplifies the publishing and distribution of important business information. According to Whitton, "It's a better channel for conveying information, a better medium."
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WebSmart Changes to Data Area Locking
In versions of WebSmart previous to the recently released 4.0, when using the data area functions the data area was locked using a *SHRRD option. This meant that the data area was not truly locked. This would mean, for example, that if you were using a data area to keep track of a "last-used number" for a file key, you might sometimes get duplicate records because the program accessed the data area twice simultaneously.
For WebSmart 4.0, one of the enhancements made was that the data area functions were changed to instead use the *EXCL option, to lock the data area exclusively to the job.
However, this change has programmatic implications, in that if you recompile a program created under a previous release without adding an unlockdtaara function, the data area will remain locked to all other programs until you do a WRKOBJLCK and remove the locks manually. So you need to remember to make this change to your programs before recompiling at 4.0.
A potential gotcha in this is that if you have a getdtaara with *LOCK followed by an upddtaara with *LOCK, this locks the
data area twice. This means you have to do two consecutive calls to the unlockdtaara
function to completely unlock it.
Here is an example of what you might have had in release 3.0:
getdtaara(dtafield, "MYDTAARA", "XL_WEBAPPS", "*LOCK");
dtafield = dtafield + 1;
upddtaara(dtafield, "MYDTAARA", "XL_WEBAPPS", "*LOCK");
For version 4.0, you would need to remove the *LOCK parameter from the UPDDTAARA and add an unlock:
upddtaara(dtafield, "MYDTAARA", "XL_WEBAPPS");
unlockdtaara("MYDTAARA", "XL_WEBAPPS");
If you have any questions on this issue, please drop us a note.
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Catapult 5 *AFPDS to PDF Conversion Poll
BCD is considering adding support for *AFPDS and/or *IPDS conversion to PDF in Catapult. In the current version of Catapult only *AFPDS to TIF is supported. *AFPDS and *IPDS are not commonly used in North America and most requests for this feature come from Europe and other countries; therefore we would appreciate your help in determining the demand for this feature.
Based on our research of the competitive offerings, most vendors create a TIFF embedded PDF. This type of PDF is not searchable, nor does it allow you to select text from it. BCD is proposing to create a text-searchable PDF, as we do not see any value in creating a large, unsearchable PDF. Our potential solution would be vastly superior to other options available.
However, while preparing this project, we have determined that supporting this feature will be a fairly major programming effort. If we decide to go forward and add this feature it would most likely be included with the next general release of Catapult, six to nine months away. The decision to add this feature will be based on demand, amount of resources needed to do the programming, and potential added costs to the clients.
By completing the survey (click on the link to open it in a new window) you will provide us with a better picture of the market place and the demand for this feature. Thank you for your time.
WebSmart 4 Public Training Class
We have scheduled a WebSmart 4 public training session for the week of July 19-22, 2004. We plan to hold the class at our location here in beautiful Sidney, BC. This class will include updated material covering all the important new features added in Version 4. For a third-party overview of the new release, read the article published a few months ago in Midrange Stuff.
If you are interested in attending this class and would like additional information, please fill out our Training Request form. (
Note: If you aren't able to attend this class, but are interested in attending in the future, please indicate this in the form; we already have a number of people planning for a fall session.) You can also contact Marcel Sarrasin, our training coordinator.
For a general overview of the contents and structure of our training class, you can visit the Training page at our web site.
This is an absolutely beautiful time of year in the Victoria area, and would be a great opportunity for you to bring along your significant other to spend some time visiting the world-famous Butchart Gardens, having tea at the Empress Hotel, or taking a stroll along the downtown waterfront. Victoria is a world-famous tourist destination, and the summers here are particularly spectacular.
WebSmart 5 Directions: HTML Wizards
Work continues unabated on WebSmart version 5, and while the release is still some time off, we thought you would be interested in some of the features that we're now working on. One of the highlights of the next release will surely be the addition of a number of HTML wizards, to simplify adding new HTML content to your definitions. These make it much easier for those not familiar with HTML to code it in their definitions. While HTML is not that complex to code, it does seem to produce its fair share of headaches to developers, so the new tools will simplify the page design process.
Here are some illustrations of the new wizards:
This window facilitates adding a new table to your program.
And this is an illustration of the wizard window for inserting a new form.
If there are any HTML-related tasks in WebSmart that you find particularly challenging or troublesome, and you'd like to make sure we're adding a wizard for that, please drop us a note.
WebSmart Tip: Searching on Timestamp (Type Z) Fields with SQL
We have recently published a useful Knowledge Base item describing how to search on the timestamp (Type Z) fields using day(), month() and year() functions with SQL. The KB entry includes a sample of the SQL we used, as well as a link to a program where we have implemented the code. For further details check out KB Entry 4785.
If you are not familiar with the ESDI Knowledge Base, you should spend a few minutes checking it out. Our KB has hundreds of entries for each of our products, including feature requests, how-to's and software fixes.
WebSmart Example Programs
Below are descriptions of the WebSmart Example Programs that are new this month. Click on the links to see the demos and additional details on how you can implement these features in your own programs.
- Example 67 - Populating a dropdownbox using SQL. This example populates a dynamic drop down box using SQL to grab the information from a file.
- Example 68 - Displaying dynamic column text. This program displays dynamic (bubble) text depending on the sort order of each column.
- Example 69 - Converting a file to a text file. This example program illustrates how you can take an iSeries data file and convert it to a text file using PML.
For further details on any of the WebSmart examples, or if you have any questions on how to implement the techniques they illustrate, please contact Technical Support.
ProGen Plus Feature Overview: CALLFNC Action
While the CALLFNC action has been available in ProGen for quite some time, we still get calls from experienced ProGen Plus programmers who haven't incorporated it into their programming problem-solving toolkit. Simply put, the CALLFNC action allows you to create subroutines written in Actions.
To use it, all you have to do is this:
- In the Actions Editor context where you need to add the call to the subroutine, use I to Insert a CALLFNC action.
- For the function name, specify the name of the subroutine that you will create, and for the function type, specify *USER. Optionally, type a function description (see the illustration below).
- Press Enter to add the line to your Actions.
- Then press F7 to switch to another context, and Page Down until you get to the bottom of your Actions Editor contexts. There you will find, nestled at the very end, your new subroutine as an Actions Editor Context! Select the context, and start adding actions...
After adding your initial CALLFNC, you can insert more CALLFNC Actions to the same function wherever else you need to call the routine, or create other new functions.
In summary, in the design tool the result of the CALLFNC is a new context in the Actions Editor that you can work with just like any other context. In your generated code, the result is a subroutine using the name you specified in the Actions Editor for your *USER function.
For the more advanced ProGen user, you can also take advantage of the CALLFNC *PROGEN option: this allows you to call any of the standard subroutines included in the program template. For example: if in a Style A program you wanted to allow the user to add records, but instead of doing a simple Add you needed to execute a series of preliminary steps that culminated in adding a record at the very end, you could use a CALLFNC to do this. All you would need to do is change your standard F6=CREATE function key to be of type ACTIONS, add all your logic to the new context, and then finish up with a CALLFNC *PROGEN to $ADD. Another example of a commonly used *PROGEN function is $CLRMS, to clear messages.
When you add a CALLFNC *PROGEN, the design tool presents a standard list of available functions. This list represents those routines that we considered that you would be most likely to use. However, if in the process of familiarizing yourself with the code to try and sort out a problem, you spot another routine in the generated code that you think you could use in your own logic, you can execute the ZWRKFNC command to maintain the list of the functions available to call. The next time you enter your definition, that function will be in the list.
If you have any questions about the CALLFNC, give us a call. It's an extremely useful tool for the journeyman ProGen programmer.
ProGen 9 Feature Requests
The ESDI development team is beginning to work on ProGen Plus Version 9 and is now seeking input from our customers on features that you would like to see included in the upcoming release.
If you work with ProGen Plus on a regular basis and find yourself stymied on occasion due to the lack of a particular feature, we would like to hear from you. Likewise, if there is an inordinately complex set of steps you find yourself having to repeat on a regular basis to achieve a simple outcome, please drop us a note. Or if you have become aware of a great new feature in RPG that the current release of ProGen Plus doesn't easily handle, do give us a call.
Client input is always an important part of the decisions made for (and against) the value of different suggested features, so no matter how trivial you think a feature may be, or how difficult to implement, we greatly appreciate all the input we get and it is always taken into account.
If you have any suggestions, please give us a call at (250) 655-1766, or drop us a note. We look forward to hearing from you.
Summary List of Recent Updates
Nexus 2.06
Nexus 2.06 includes the following enhancements and fixes:
NEXUS 2.06 - 2004/07/06
Nexus 2.06 has recently been released, with a number of enhancements and fixes. For a complete list of the changes, please visit the Nexus Updates page on our web site.
Enhancements
- WOW support for instance level authority in addition to User and Group.
- Redesigned Group Management UI will now allow searches and page at a time maintenance.
- For the WOW distribution rules added a Display All ability to display all authorities and rules.
- The WOW (Web Object Warehouse) now supports limited Key Pairs. Each Instance can have a customized list of key pairs.
- A completely new UI for adding and maintaining To Do list entry.
- Added the "Create Document" function in the WOW (Web Object Warehouse).
- The distribution rules now allow the authorities be sequenced.
- An advanced search has been added to the WOW (Web Object Warehouse) allowing the use of key pairs.
Fixes
- Corrected problems with JavaScript translation for some international sites.
- Corrected some search issues in the WOW history and Key Pairs list.
- Corrected problems with authority usage in some instances.
- Fixed problem with links opening in the same window.
- The Group Links Portlet class will now display both the group links followed by the current users personal links.
WebSmart 4.02
- Build 7421 - 2004/06/03 - This update includes all previous fixes, as well as the following: Removes the limit of 50 files in a PDW; messages issued on a failure to save in WCM have been clarified, and the processes for recovering the definition have been improved; a fix to inline PML function naming for JSE, and we have also fixed an order-by problem in the SQL template.
- W402004P.EXE - 2004/06/03 - Includes all previous enhancements and fixes plus Trap occasional error issued by CEEMSG; fix rare parm length problem; allow longer URLs in geturl; fix some SQL parsing problems.
Please visit the WebSmart Updates page for further information on the available updates.
File-Flash Plus 4.02
These updates require V4R5M0 as a minimum operating system release level.
- FFP40003 - 2004/06/03 - Fixed ability to print query results from a non-keyed file.
Please visit the File-Flash Plus Updates page for further information on the available updates.
ProGen Plus 8.01
- PG8R009 - 2004/06/14 - Corrected a problem where in Style F, &s was not correctly creating the subtotal work field over the specified field.
Please visit the ProGen Plus Updates page for further information on the available updates.
Docu-Mint/400 6.0
- DN60R010 - Fixes an issue with the PRTPGMEXP command going into message wait with a 'receiver too small to hold result' error(536576)
Please visit the Docu-Mint Updates page for further information on the available updates.
© 2004 ExcelSystems Software Development, Inc.
ProGen Plus and ProGen WebSmart are Trademarks in the US and Canada.
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