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 BCD @ Fall IBM Tech Conference, iSeries DevCon
IBM iSeries Technical Conference
The next IBM iSeries Technical Conference EXPO will be October 17-19 in Miami Beach, FL at the Hilton Fontainebleau, where you'll find BCD at booth #15. As always, we'd be happy to have a chat and spend a few minutes giving you a run-through of all the projects that we're currently working on, or discussing any of your own projects that you'd like some direction with.
iSeries DevCon 2005
BCD will also be at iSeries DevCon (Developers Conference) 2005 in Las Vegas, November 7-9, meeting with people and demonstrating products at the BCD booth. If you're going to make it to Vegas for that, you'll find us at booth 530, where you can enter to win a prize in the Expo drawing. We will also be sponsoring 3 sessions there, two by George Farr (IBM) and one led by Craig Pelkie.
So we'll be on the road a fair bit during the next few months, and we hope to see you around!
Clover Beta to be Announced at COMMON.
Development work on the Clover beta is complete, and we'll be pleased to announce it's release at COMMON this week.
What is Clover?
For those who haven't yet read about it, Clover is an optional component of the WebSmart suite. Its purpose is to allow developers and users to design reports and queries and deploy them in browsers. Clover is seamlessly integrated into WebSmart, so there is no special or separate install procedure. If you install the main WebSmart components (WAS on the server, IDE on the client) then you can use all the features of Clover.
Clover is designed to make it easy to write reports with subtotals, breaks, summaries or details, produce online bar graphs and more. It works with your existing iSeries or i5 database files, and provides SQL wizards to make constructing simple or complex relations between files intuitive.
For additional information, check the article in June's Tech Update.
What does Clover have that WebSmart doesn't?
WebSmart provides a platform to create sophisticated web applications such as file maintenance, order entry, shopping carts, web forums, document management, web services oriented applications, corporate portals, etc. - just about any business application you can imagine. Using WebSmart's coding environment, you can also write typical business reports such as sales analysis, invoices, etc. However, some of the features of typical reports, such as subtotals and breaks on values, require coding within the tool to accomplish these things. Clover addresses this issue by providing a new interface, tightly integrated with many of the existing features of the IDE, to enable you to write reports with little or no coding. It has its own set of templates that drive the Clover report creation wizards to make it easy to create reports with breaks, subtotals, graphs, etc. Using the included SQL wizard, you can relate many files (for example, join a header to a detail file) and define how you want the data sorted, filtered and reported.
We are now accepting applications for candidates to join our beta program.
By participating in the beta test, you will get early access to the software and all its features, as well as the developer's ear while you're trying it out. The beta stage of the software is when it's particularly malleable, and we're able to give you a quicker turnaround on your suggestions.
So if Clover sounds like something that you'd like to try out, we encourage you to visit the Clover Beta Request page at our web site.
If you have any questions about the beta, you can contact Technical Support. We will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the software.
WebSmart 5.23 Now Available
If you have visited the WebSmart home page lately, you may have noticed that there are now two versions of WebSmart available for download: WebSmart 5.11 and WebSmart 5.23. The reason we have both version there (for a short while) is because of the magnitude of the changes encompassed in version 5.23.
WebSmart 5.23 contains an infrastructure improvement to better support international character sets. Under previous versions of WebSmart the tool would need to be configured with (often custom) translation tables before special characters could be used. The Version 5.23 install automatically detects the CCSID and configures the tool as needed. Furthermore all special characters which had in the past caused problems have been removed from the underlying source code which should greatly minimize any potential character set issues in the future.
Existing WebSmart customers may need to make some adjustments to their UPARSER code after upgrading to version 5.23. Since the underlying WAS function names have changed in many cases, if these functions are called from your custom code you may need to update the calls (usually this simply involves a search and replace). Existing international clients will need to reconcile the two modes of translation (CCSID-based and Translation Table-Based) and as a result may need to consider more issues when upgrading existing applications. Please contact tech support for more information if you have any questions or concerns.
WebSmart 5.23 also lays the foundation for a series of features which should soon be released. These upcoming features include:
- Piping
- The ability to retrieve the entire post data stream (used for some web services)
- The ability to customize H-specs (custom date and decimal formats, etc)
- The ability to test fields for NULL values.
- CCSID based translation abilities
- Built in ability to retrieve Nexus session information variables
If you are considering upgrading to WebSmart 5.23, or have already, and are interested in any of these features please give Technical Support a call and we may be able to give you a 'sneak preview' of some of this functionality (rumour has it they may be able to unlock some extra features in the product).
New WebSmart Example Programs: Automatic Redirects, Pop Up Calendars.
The following new WebSmart example programs were added recently:
- Example 99 - Example Program 99 demonstrates how to add a calendar to a date lookup.
- Example 98 - Example Program 98 illustrates a technique you can use to automatically redirect to a different page after a specified time period (for examle, if after the user fills out a form, you want to display a thank-you page for a few seconds before sending them to your home page).
For further details on any of the WebSmart examples, or if you have any questions on how to implement the techniques they demonstrate, please contact Technical Support.
ProGen Plus Tip: Emulating an SQL %LIKE% in Actions
We recently had a customer run into a situation where in ProGen Plus, they wanted to try and emulate the SQL %LIKE% function with Actions. Here is a brief outline of how we addressed this issue.
First you need to create a *PANEL work field with attributes matching those of the field you will be searching. The value you'll be searching for can then either be passed into the program as a parameter, or you can just load the field at a context prior to *FILT. Alternately, you could just place the *PANEL work field in the subfile control, and the user can enter the value by hand.
The key chunk of code needs to be at the *FILT (Filter Subfile) context. In there, you need to use the SCAN function to check a file field for the occurence of the value of the work field. If the value is not found, then you can set the record status field to "0", otherwise set it to "1" (remember that the record status work field is Alpha).
Here is an illustration of how our customer set this up:
Explanation
In line 6, we first evaluate whether the field WCARDSRCH is not blank; this is the *PANEL work field that has been placed on the subfile control. If the user has entered a value into the search field, we first clear another *PANEL work field where we will put the results of our EVAL. Then we use the %SCAN function to evaluate whether the text string entered by the user is found in the field S01AD1. Depending on whether the value is found, we enter another IF structure where we load the Record Status work field with an appropriate value, to control whether that record is listed in the subfile or not.
The structure of the %SCAN function is as follows:
%SCAN(search argument : source string {: start})
%SCAN returns the first position of the search argument in the source string, or 0 if it was not found. If the start position is specified, the search begins at the starting position. The result is always the position in the source string even if the starting position is specified. The starting position defaults to 1.
For further information, you can review the IBM documentation on the %SCAN function. If you have any questions about this tip, you can contact Tech Support.
ESDI Staff Additions and Moves
There will be several new faces and a temporarily empty cubicle at ESDI during the coming weeks. First of all, we're pleased to welcome two new additions to the technical support department: Ryan Clemens and Victor Chow rose to the top in what was our largest pool of interviewees ever. Both Ryan and Victor have shown a strong technical aptitude and positive attitudes, and we're enthusiastic about the skills and energy that they'll add to the support department. Ryan and Victor will be attending the WebSmart training session next week as they jump right into things.
The temporarily empty cubicle is in the consulting side of the office, where Mike Richard has gone to London for 6 months, to fill Duncan Kenzie's shoes working on a project for Universal Music Group (UMG).
We appreciate your continued support as we go through these changes, particularly as the new support reps come on line.
Summary List of Recent Updates
Nexus 2.53
Nexus 2.53 will be available September 19, and include the following fixes and enhancements:
- An important new security update, extending the Nexus Pro portlet availability until May 31, 2006.
- Fix to the Group Links authority patch
- Limits WOW search results to 500.
- Nexus Pro extension,
- iSeries 'everyone' group duplication patch.
Please visit the Nexus Updates page for further information on the available updates.
ProGen Plus 8.04
These are the latest ProGen Plus updates:
- PG8R049 - 2005/09/12 - Added validation to the USRCOD member delete. Added parameter and validation to delete USRCOD from the ZDLTPDF command. Fixed panel delete issues with orphaned attributes and validation modules.
- PG8R048 - 2005/08/26 - Addresses an issue where you were prevented from adding several *PANEL work fields with &P.
- PG8R047 - 2005/08/24 - Fixes a problem where cursor positioning code at the Actions Editor context *BKYP was being superceded by generated code.
Please visit the ProGen Plus Updates page for further information on the available updates.
© 2005 ExcelSystems Software Development, Inc.
ProGen WebSmart and ProGen Plus are Registered Trademarks in the US and Canada, and Trademarks in all other countries.
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