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 BCD @ Spring COMMON Conference and Expo & Other Shows
If you are planning to attend the spring COMMON Conference and Expo, we'll look forward to the opportunity to meeting you and having a chat. At the Expo (March 26-28) you can find us at booth 703. And don't forget to request a demo of the new versions of Nexus, Catapult, Clover and WebSmart!
At the conference, we will also be hosting two events. Richard Morgan, a member of the WebSmart and Clover development team, will be leading a session entitled ILE RPG CGI Development Using ProGen WebSmart and the Apache Server, on Thursday, March 30 from 8:00-9:15 am in room M101-C. This session will introduce the WebSmart development tool and demonstrate how browser-based applications can be developed using the WebSmart templates and design wizard. The sessions will focus on using the WebSmart Integrated Development Environment and also review the built in report design facilities of Clover, WebSmart's report design plug-in. Richard will also discuss the benefits of deploying CGI applications using the Apache Web Server and highlight advantages of a true browser-based model using CGI vs. alternatives that capture and convert the 5250 data stream.
Kevin Cronin will also be conducting his award-winning CGI Made Easy - Browser Development with WebSmart lab on Monday, March 27 at, 2:00 pm in room 200-A. In his lab you will get a hands-on introduction to building ILE RPG CGI programs using WebSmart, a charter member of the IBM iSeries Developer Roadmap. Kevin will introduce you to the advantages of web deployment using the Apache web server which ships as a standard component of OS/400. This lab has in recent times been well-attended (and highly rated) so if you're going to be in Minneapolis you should take a second now to visit the COMMON web site to sign up (at the link above), to ensure you get a spot.
BCD Presence at Other Trade Shows
BCD will also have sales representatives and developers at several other upcoming iSeries events across North America:
- The Canucks can visit us at our booth at the Toronto's User Group (TUG) Annual Technical Education Conference,
Tuesday April 18th, in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada.
- And if you'll be at the 2006 IBM System i5 Spring Technical Conference EXPO
May 8-10 (Hilton Walt Disney World Resort, FL) you will find us in booth 18.
- And finally, we'll also have booths at the iSeries Core Decisions conferences
May 2nd in Seattle, WA;
June 27 in Columbus, OH and
June 29 Dallas, TX.
If you are attending any of these events, we'll look forward to meeting you!
Clover 1.13 Available for Download
We are pleased to announce that Clover 1.13 is now in General Availability (after completion of an extensive beta test period). You can download the software from the Free Software Downloads area of our site. 
Clover 1.13 includes the following main features:
- Several new template families, with a number of templates within each, all designed specifically to create reports of various types.
- Powerful, all-new wizard screens to easily create complex reports without coding a line of PML or HTML.
- Flexible and powerful charting and graphing templates, to create several styles of Flash graphs (pie, line and bar charts of different types).
- Numerous features to make it simple to create reports, including options to work with subtotals, level breaks, sorting and conditions.
- All the features of the WebSmart IDE for working with your HTML and PML code.
For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting this new application, your wait is drawing to an end! Clover builds on the success we have experienced over the last few years with WebSmart, and its features will greatly enhance the applications you are building with WebSmart, as well as extend WebSmart's usefulness to other people in your company who may have less programming knowledge.
If you have any questions about Clover 1.13, please contact Tech Support.
Clover Feature Overview: Charting Options
One of the headline features of Clover are the graphing templates. The graphing templates support many features that allow you to create a wide range of dynamically generated graphs. By using the template options and the options available for customizing the graphs, you'll be able to convey the sense of your data in the simplest terms and the highest impact.
Bar and pie charts are available in both 2D and 3D formats. With little effort you can build professional charts and reports, drill down, filter data, create calculated fields and build summaries.
Example of How to Customize your Charts
This example from our WebSmart demo site begins with a 3D Bar Chart, shown at right, that drills down to a 3D Pie Chart.
A common feature you'll want to add to your charts is to make each bar a link to another page that displays additional information about that bar. For example, you could link to a pie chart that details the breakdown of the column in your initial chart, or link to a table that lists the details of that category, or both!
To make your chart bars linkable, you just need to add a link attribute to the set tag. So if your initial <set> tag looked like this:
<set name="<field name=IMCAT>" color="DC2323" value="<htmlfield subfield="*CALCFLDS.inventory" type="*SUBTOT" length=18 dec=2 editcode="P">"/>
all you need to do is add a link attribute to the <set> tag, as shown here:
<set name="<field name=IMCAT>" color="DC2323" value="<htmlfield subfield="*CALCFLDS.inventory" type="*SUBTOT" length=18 dec=2 editcode="P">"
link="cat1.pgm?task=Run_Flash&category=<field name=IMCAT>"/>
When the user clicks on any of the bars in the initial graph, the program presents a second page, similar to the one shown at right.
On this page, only the pie chart is initially presented. You can then add a link to each slice, passing appropriate parameters, to generate a current inventory value by item detail report below the pie.
Changing Graph Colors
Another example of a simple change you can make is to customize the color of the bars and hover information. To do this, you just need to add the following attributes to the <graph> tag:
bgcolor="E5E3F6" hovercapbg="F7E700"
Note that the graphs do not use the # sign prepended to the color.
The IDE Color Picker
Another helpful tool for working with your graphs is our color picker. This is available by Right Clicking in the HTML, selecting Insert and then Color. You can use the window presented to pick a color and return the corresponding hex value to your HTML.
If you have any questions contact our Tech Support
Catapult 6 Beta Available Friday, March 24
We know that you've been eagerly anticipating the next release of Catapult, and we are now just wrapping up the New Features Guide for the
initial beta release on March 24. If you are interested in participating in the Catapult 6 Beta, please fill out the form at our web site.
Catapult 6 is a major new release which includes many new features, including the following:
- Support for polling PC directories and distributing PC files using the same grab rules features that you apply to iSeries files.
- Grab-rule security, to specify who is authorized to view and edit specific grab rules.
- CC and BCC emailing support.
- Updated Console and Poller Configuration UI.
- Support for retrieving distribution/mailing list values from outside files.
- Support for mail group entry replacement values.
The "Poll-a-Dir" feature (ability to poll PC directories for files to distribute) has been in particularly high demand, and we're very pleased with the features we've been able to support in its initial release. Depending on the formats of the files you select, not only will you be able to distribute them with Catapult, but also split and extract other data from them, just as you do with your iSeries reports.
The Catapult 6 beta will be available March 24, and we are now accepting applications to participate in the beta program.
If you have any questions about the upcoming release, or any of the features it includes, please contact Technical Support.
New BCD Business Partner Portal (Powered by Nexus)
In our continued efforts to contribute to the success of our quickly-expanding BCD Business Partner network, we have
recently created a new Business Partner Portal using Nexus v3.
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A Sales by Year graph in the middle, with various news items on the sides.
The graph columns can be clicked to present pie charts with more detailed
sales breakdowns by product. | The Portal contains numerous WebSmart programs as well as several informational charts created with Clover, the newest member of the WebSmart family. The Business Partner Portal is an excellent example of what you can provide for your own company's dealer network, or to other companies and individuals with whom your company has a special relationship, and needs to provide information to.
Web sites for your company's business partner or dealer network are becoming a necessity. Your associates need real-time access to important information such as your inventory, current marketing material, sales tracking information, insider news, corporate calendars etc. Managing a BP network can also be time consuming when you have to communicate and share information with dozens or hundreds of partners. Nexus is an ideal solution for providing this service to your BPs.
Nexus is an easy solution to implement with excellent interfaces for creating web pages with portlets, sharing documents, managing users and groups, defining authorities and making your portal fully secure.
Here are some of the features of the BCD Business Partner Portal:
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Secure: Only Business Partners and authorized BCD personnel can access the portal. Each BP only sees what they are authorized to including their own sales records and active trials.
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Manageability: The portal can be managed by non-technical people. They can create new pages and portlets, add documents and define authorities.
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Navigation: You can navigate through the portal in a variety of ways including drop down menus, the ECM Navigator menu tree, breadcrumbs or the site wide search.
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A support request form, with a graph of recorded
incidents on the right, and various other
support links on the left. |
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Charts: View Clover Charts of Sales history and drill down by year or product.
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Document Repository: All marketing material is easily accessible using the ECM Navigator and Viewer or by using the site search. It is easy to add and secure documents in the ECM (Enterprise Content Manager)
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Customer Management: Portlets containing WebSmart programs to view sales records, enter sales projections and trial management.
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Technical Support: WebSmart programs and Group Links portlets were used to help BPs resolve client's problems faster by providing resources for Technical Support.
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iSeries Terminal Emulator: Using the Mocha Terminal Emulator BPs can access their iSeries.
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Calendar of Events: All important events can be viewed in the Calendar including product releases, training dates, office closures and BPs can enter their own important events.
Nexus v3 is still in development, but we hope to make it available within a few months. The main Nexus v3 features that we have used in our Business Partner Portal are: the ECM (Enterprise Content Manager), the new Calendar, the site wide search and breadcrumbs. We have also taken advantage of version 3's more flexible portal instance display options.
BCD's new Business Partner liaison is Marcel Sarrasin, who has recently returned from a 5 month parental leave of absence from BCD and Excelsystems. Marcel is working out of Toronto, Ontario and will be primarily helping Business Partners increase sales by being more involved with trials, conducting product training and, being on the East Coast, providing technical support beginning earlier in the day.
WebSmart Receives 2006 iSeries News Reader's Choice Accolade
BCD is pleased to announce that we've received yet another accolade from one of our customers: WebSmart has received a 2006 iSeries News Reader's Choice award.
Take a couple minutes to read about what developer Roy Wall at Murray City (UT) was able to accomplish with WebSmart in just a few weeks. Murray City faced a crisis when one of their vendors insisted they move to a more costly solution within 30 days to support the city's online services, or have their support cut off. With their backs against the wall, Roy Wall and his staff, together with some help from the BCD consulting team, were able to use WebSmart to put together a solution that worked better than the original. Roy stated that in addition, during "the process we learned the tools and technical know-how to modify WebSmart's source as our needs might require."
SteelNet Consulting Profile
Overview
We have recently published on our web site a new Case Study (PDF, opens in new window) of a project recently completed by our consulting team, working alongside Steve McEneany of SteelNet Solutions, Inc. Steve McEneany is a Certified Management Consultant with over a decade's worth of private sector experience in strategic planning, business analysis, business process re-engineering and information technology planning. He attended the Royal College of Military Science, and for 22 years was attached to the Royal
Logistics Corp. McEneany managed an ordinance budget of over $172,000,000 and moved 180,000 British troops and equipment out of East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. He now runs a consulting firm in Vancouver, BC, called Steelnet Solutions, Inc. McEneany, along with one partner and four associates use process analysis techniques to help organizations improve profitability. After flagging areas that need improvement, they roll up their sleeves and affect transformation. Says McEneany, "Lots of consultants make recommendations and then move on. We tell you how it should be done and then we'll actually do it."
In April, he hit a snag in an iSeries ERP implementation project that was almost finished. The project deadline and budget to which he had firmly committed were in jeopardy, and his client, a pharmacy wholesaler, was expecting successful completion of the project. Upon closely scrutinizing the web-based inventory inquiry, catalogue, and order entry module supplied by the ERP system vendor they realized that it would not satisfy the requirements of the pharmacies they served. "We committed to project completion by July 1st and it was already April," says McEneany adding, "I was running out of time and we needed help."
To read about how Steve and the WebSmart consulting team built a 28-page web application in 43 days, from start to finish, please click here to read the PDF of the complete case study.
For further information about how this application was developed or for details on our consulting services, please contact Kevin Cronin.
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Using the FireFox Developer Toolbar
FireFox is now a reasonably popular browser, competing successfully with IE. One of the major advantages of FireFox is the number of free available plugins and extensions that are available. One of the most useful of these extensions is the Developer Toolbar.
The FireFox Developer Toolbar adds a number of important facilities to the browser, including a DOM inspector and a JavaScript console that will record and show you a list of any JavaScript errors occurring on your page. One of the tools I find most useful when I'm working with reasonably complex scripts is the 'View Generated Source ' option. This shows you not only the original HTML for the page but also any resulting HTML that may have been dynamically generated at runtime. For example, if your script uses something like this:
document.getElementById("mydiv").innerHTML = somevalue;
this tool will show you the resulting contents of the element with the id of "mydiv". This is extremely useful for debugging scripts because it helps you verify that what you are generating is correct. To accomplish the same thing in IE would require you to write custom script to present alert boxes or place generated code in a temporary textbox, which is a pain.
By the way- I bly encourage you to write cross-browser compliant Javascript code. One approach is to create a library of cross-browser scripts. As FireFox gains wider adoption, it's likely that more and more of your end-users will be using FireFox.
If you have any questions about this matter, please email tech support.
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New WebSmart Example Program: Page-at-a-Time with AJAX Search.
The WebSmart support group has added another new WebSmart example program to our library:
- Example 109 - This example program is a Page At A Time listing with a twist. It uses an AJAX call to get the details for the page list. The search, next/prev and sort order actions all perform AJAX calls to update the list. This allows seamless updating since the page doesn't need to reload for every action.
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.
Summary List of Recent Updates
ProGen Plus 8.04
These are the latest ProGen Plus updates (all these require V5R1 or later):
- PG8R055 - 2006/02/21 - This update corrects a problem encountered when trying to copy a Style G program to a combination of Styles A and N (Maintenance and Transaction) or to two Styles D's (Inquiry with subfile).
- PG8R054 - 2006/02/10 - This update fixes problems with validation modules when using option 6 to copy a definition. A record in file GN#FFVF was not being updated properly.
Please visit the ProGen Plus Updates page for further information on the available updates.
© 2006 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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