| |
 Clover
Beta Now Available for Download.
The Clover beta will be available for a short while longer, as
we work  through
fine-tuning the last group of features prior to Clover's release
early in 2006. If you are a WebSmart developer (experienced or
not!) and you're looking to extend the range of your applications,
we invite you to try out the new features and templates available
with Clover.
The Clover Beta is now available by request; just contact
the tech support office, or visit the beta
request page at our web site and fill out the form. Drop us
a quick note, and you'll be trying out the new templates within
minutes!
Clover
Feature Profile: Field Creation Options.
An important new feature that we've recently added to the Clover
wizard is the ability to create derived fields during the preliminary
design stage, and include these as part of your design.
As you walk through the design of a new program, Clover presents
the Derived and Summary Fields dialog immediately after you add
your files. From this window you can create as many new fields
as you need. Just click the Add button to get started.
Here is an illustration of the window presented to create new derived
fields:
In the illustration above we are about to select the concat function
from the dropdown list. Below the list is the window where you
can enter your own free-format string to define the field. When
you define your derived fields you can use any of the standard
operations, as well as combinations of the 200 or so functions
available to choose from.
 A
useful feature here is that your fields are validated on the server
as you add them, as shown in the example at right:
Here we tried to create a simple concat field, but we used too
many fields; when we hit OK, Clover consulted briefly with the
server, and returned the error shown here.
You can create two types of calculated fields:
- Summary fields. These use columnar functions such as sum
and count that work on a column of data. They can only be used
in summary reports.
- Derived fields. These use scalar functions such as substring
that work on a row of data, i.e. every row in the report is
substringed according to the derived field.
Clover allows you to create these fields as soon as you add your
files so that at the next step you can add them to your summary
report logic, or your standard report layout.
Derived fields are also useful in cases where you are prompting
the user for some sort of selection criteria, or for other information
to appear on your report. There are many cases where the information
that you'll be prompting the user for isn't in the same format
as what you have in your database. Using the options available
in the window shown above you can then create a derived field that
you'll later use when you create your filter.
Further Examples of Derived Fields
Here is an example of a derived field: suppose you need to concatenate
two fields, using the first three letters of each name and trimming
out any spaces as you do so, but putting a hyphen in between each
letter. You could do this by typing in the following:
trim(substring(FIELD-A,1,3))
concat('-') concat (trim(substring(FIELD-B,1,3)))
Or if you want to create a new field called mark_up, you could
create it as follows:
(ret_price - whl_price) /
whl_price
(In this example you'd also want to add a filter of whl_price <> 0
to avoid a divide by zero problem.)
These and other great features are now available in the latest
version of the Clover beta.
Nexus
3 Feature Preview: New Skins Support
Whenever you're creating a site that you want all your employees
or customers to access regularly, and also do a good job of reflecting
your corporate identity, you just can't get away from the importance
of how it looks. For this reason, Nexus 3 customers will be very
pleased with the powerful new tools available for working with
skins.
Nexus users can choose which skin to use from their Portal Settings
options. The selection of skins available for your users to use
is controlled by the Site Manager, from the Manage Site Skins link.
When you choose this option Nexus presents a list of the skins
that are shipped with the software, and a link to create new ones:
When you click on the option to change any of the existing skins,
or add a new one, Nexus presents this page:
Any changes you make to the options along the left are immediately
reflected in the sample page layout in the middle. In addition,
you can click on the icon next to the color options to present
a color wheel from which you can select the colors you need.
The Nexus 3 beta will be available soon; for further details contact Tech
Support.
 |
|
 |
Season's Greetings from BCD Nordic!
Visit our NEW web site: www.bcdnordic.dk.
As official BCD representatives for Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and the
North Pole, BCD Nordic would like to extend
their warmest season's greetings to all
BCD customers!
BCD Nordic has been a BCD dealer since
1992, exclusive BCD dealer in the Nordic
countries since 1997. BCD Nordic is comprised
of two key individuals: Olav Christensen
and David B. Jonsson. David has been working
with BCD Nordic since September 2005 as
the primary sales rep, while Olav takes
care of most of the technical aspects.
Both team members have extensive technical
skill sets in software development.
BCD Nordic's new sales rep, David B. Jonsson,
has twice worked for IBM; in the iSeries
division and cross platform initiatives
across the Nordic region, Europe and USA,
and also as a Business Partner to IBM,
Pre-sales and Nordic Manager for DataMirror
in Nordic and Europe. Olav Christensen
is the manager of BCD Nordic, founded as
an IT-consulting company in 1990. Olav
has worked as an IT-consulting person since
1975.
BCD Nordic has satellite office in Malmö,
Sweden near the Øresund
Bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark.
The Nordic headquarters is located in Vemmelev
near the Great
Belt Bridge (one of the largest in
the world) in Denmark.
Our Focus in 2006: Accessibility
In conjunction with the introduction of
the Try & Buy concept, BCD Nordic is working
on an aggressive marketing plan for 2006
in all five countries in our region. We
are also continuing to work with the BCD
International customers in the territory
and signing new Business Partners. BCD
Nordic is focused on Web Accessibility
enablement. Accessibility is not just good
for some of us, it's good for all of us!
Governments, finance markets, enterprises
and companies in general are focusing on
giving their customers accessibility to
their web applications, particularly as
a tool for customer with disabilities which
impede their access to traditional service
points. This is a huge demand in the industry
and over 750 million people in the world
have some form of disability, one of the
strongest market growth areas in Internet
accessibility across the world. We are
in close cooperation with IBM Corp, driving
and delivering the Accessibility enablement's
technology.
For further information about BCD Nordic,
please visit
our web site, or contact Olav
Christensen.
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Catapult
Tip: Improving the Performance of the Catapult Poller
A common challenge faced by many companies that purchase Catapult,
our automated report distribution software, is that Catapult usage
seems to grow exponentially. Companies that just a few months before
relied on various mechanisms to distribute reports (individual
emails, fax, print, FedEx, bike messenger, etc.), realize how many
tasks they can use Catapult for, and suddenly the users multiply
by the dozen, grab rules by the hundred and the report by the thousand.
Suddenly you're finding that managers who used to be content to
wait a few hours for a report to reach their desks are now complaining
when they don't have it in their inboxes within minutes of being
run.
If this is a challenge you're currently facing, you'll definitely
want to take a few minutes to review a recently published Knowledge
Base entry: How
to increase performance of the Catapult Poller.
Our 5 most important recommendations are:
- Have a minimum of 256 MB or 512MB (recommended) of RAM installed
on the Poller PC.
- Meet or exceed Catapult's system requirements and have a
dedicated Poller PC.
- Limit Catapult's scanning process to a subset of queues.
- Limit the size of your History List or clear it on a daily
basis.
- And finally, a fast, stable network.
The KB entry expands on each of these recommendations with additional
details.
Information is power, and everyone seems to be wanting more, and
sooner. Don't let yourself get caught out, with critical reports
not making it to their recipient promptly!
If you have any questions about any of the recommendations, you
can contact Tech
Support for help. This Knowledge Base entry is one of hundreds
available at our web site!
New
WebSmart Example Programs: Making Submit Buttons Mimic Text, Sendmailex
tip.
We've recently added a couple new WebSmart
example programs:
- Example
106 - This example shows how you can make a submit button
look like a regular hyperlink using CSS. This allows you
to use the form submission properties of a submit button
without using any JavaScript.
- Example
105 - Example 105 demonstrates how to use the sendmailex
function to send an email where the ReplyTo address differs
from the SentFrom address.
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.
ESDI
Adds Another Member to the Development Team
ExcelSystems Software Development Inc. (ESDI - the development
arm of BCD International) is happy to welcome a new software developer
to our Sidney, BC headquarters. Jon Taylor is
from right here in Victoria, and has spent the last 4 years primarily
developing Java web applications.
Jon's previous projects include working with a firm that creates
mentoring software for corporations, to match their employees for
training or knowledge transfer. Jon's past projects also include
an advertising network, a search engine, an application server,
an online classifieds and an XML web language. Jon's favorite recent
project was working with a team on an entry into the Darpa Grand
Challenge autonomous robot race.
Jon will initially be working mainly on WebSmart, as we ramp up
to Release 6. We look forward to Jon's contributions during the
coming years.
 |
|
 |
ProGen Plus Tech Tip
How to bind an external procedure to a
ProGen program.
If you need to call an external procedure
from a ProGen program, you can do that
as follows:
- Go to Actions Editor, and at any
context (*INIT recommended) add a USRSRC
action to define the D spec for the
procedure.
- At the Actions context at which
you need to call the procedure, again
add a USRSRC action to call the procedure.
- Finally, at the Exit Design panel
use Option 7, then press F6 to bind
the procedure to your program.
You can find this tip and hundreds more
like it in our online Knowledge
Base. If you have any questions about
this entry, please email
tech support. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Summary
List of Recent Updates
ProGen Plus 8.04
These are the latest ProGen Plus updates:
PG8R051 -
2005/11/01 - Requires OS/400 V5R1 or later. Improved string handling
in EVAL and Conditions. Corrected problem with display of work
field creation screens where extraneous chars were present in
name field. Several changes to file process when deleting, including
the Where Used screen which now displays correct Where Used file
list and other minor fixes.
Please visit the ProGen
Plus Updates page for further information on the available
updates.
File-Flash Plus 4.02
- FFP40008 -
2005/08/10 - Requires OS/400 V5R1 or later.
Support for displaying files linked to an IDDU description.
Addresses an issue with displaying a file linked to an IDDU
description where it would fail with a "Could not resolve to
object" message.
Please visit the File-Flash
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.
|
 |
|
