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 BCD @ Fall COMMON Conference and Expo
If you are planning to attend the fall COMMON Conference and Expo in Miami Beach in a few weeks, pencil in a few minutes to come by our booth. It will be a great opportunity to talk about where you're headed with your current development projects and how we can help you out.
At the Expo (Sept 17-19) you'll find us at booth 501. We'll be doing demos of the new versions of WebSmart, Clover, Catapult and Nexus - there's lots happening at BCD right now! We'll also have time to answer any questions you may have about our other products.
At the COMMON conference, we will be hosting two events. Kevin Cronin will be leading a session entitled ILE RPG CGI Development Using ProGen WebSmart and the Apache Server, on Tuesday September 19 from 2:00 - 3:15 PM, in room A208 of the Convention Center. This session will introduce the WebSmart development tool and demonstrate how browser-based applications can be developed using the WebSmart templates and design wizard. Kevin will focus on using the WebSmart Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and also review the report design facilities of Clover, which is incorporated into WebSmart. We 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 lab, CGI Made Easy - Browser Development with WebSmart, on Monday, September 18 from 8:00 to 10:45 am, in room A201. 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 been well-attended (and highly rated) so if you plan to be in Miami for the conference and want to participate, you should take a second now to visit the COMMON web site to sign up.
Other Upcoming Events
BCD will also have sales representatives and developers at the IBM Technical Conference in Las Vegas (Oct 30- Nov 1) and the iSeries DevCon, also in Las Vegas (Nov 6-8).
WebSmart Fundamentals Training Course: September in Chicago
BCD will be holding a WebSmart Fundamentals class in Chicago the last week of September. The location is a short distance from the Chicago O'Hare International Airport.
If you are interested in attending this class, or another one this fall, please fill out the Training Request form at our web site and we'll get in touch with you when we schedule another course.
If you have any questions about the location, content or pre-requisites for the classes, please contact Tech Support.
WebSmart 6/Clover 1.5 Beta Available
WebSmart 6 (integrating Clover 1.5) is now in beta. We anticipate a relatively short beta period, but will be accepting applications to join the WebSmart 6 beta program for a few more weeks yet. Please visit our web site to sign up to request the WebSmart 6 (with Clover 1.5) beta.
WebSmart 6 and Clover 1.5 include many new features, including these highlights:
- A powerful interactive debugger fully integrated into the IDE.
- Many IDE user interface enhancements, including facilities to edit external JavaScript files and templates.
- An IDE right-click option to easily insert a calendar lookup next to any date field.
- A 'New' template assistant, allowing you to preview templates before selecting one.
- Piping support, to write data to web services or the IFS (for example), or more easily generate HTML email.
- Improved MRU (Most Recently Used) files interface, to distinguish between WCM definitions and others.
- Improved integration with Nexus, allowing you to track user information.
- Many PML syntax enhancements, several new functions, and a few improvements to existing functions.
- A new abbreviated syntax for inserting code in the HTML, which corresponds to that of other web languages such as PHP and ASP. This feature also improves compatibility with external HTML design tools such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage.
- Expanded template capabilities and improvements to style sheets.
- Many significant improvements for installing and operating in non-English language environments.
- And with Clover 1.5 you can now rebuild your reports using different templates, and retain all your wizard selection options.
- Clover 1.5 also includes a new SmartCharts template, for building multi-series graphs.
Those of you who have participated in previous WebSmart beta programs are already familiar with the high quality of both the beta versions and our developer's response to any issues that have been encountered. For first-time candidates, we invite you to try us out! By participating in the beta you get the earliest possible access to all the new features as well as the opportunity to give us some feedback on how the new features will ultimately work in the production release.
If you have any questions about the upcoming release, or any of the new features, please contact Technical Support.
WebSmart 6 Feature Profile: New Program Window
An issue that you run into with WebSmart, particularly during your early days, is trying to decide between templates when building your programs. To help with this process, one of the changes we have made in WebSmart 6 is to totally re-designed the New Program interface.
Here is an illustration of the new interface:
In previous releases, when you selected the New Program option, all that was presented was a list of folders and succinct template file names, and you had to resort to using the demo programs or documentation to help you understand the differences between the various styles. As of WebSmart 6, the New Program window presents template prototypes and a list of the main features of each style as you browse through the folders for the different template families.
This interface will be especially helpful to newer users at your site, eliminating much of the guesswork involved in that key, initial decision of which template to use.
For additional details on this feature, or to sign up for the WebSmart 6 beta, please contact Tech Support
WebSmart Tips: Shortcuts
A topic we have found it useful to revisit periodically is that of the shortcuts in our various software packages. When ProGen Plus was our top seller, at training classes we would frequently be surprised by the number of 'veteran' ProGen programmers were unaware of all the great shortcuts we'd built into the product over the years. Now that WebSmart is used by a similar number of people, and has been around long enough that programmers aren't reading those New Features Guides very carefully, we're sure that there's a few things that you might have missed too....
So here's a quick list of WebSmart shortcuts and tips for making your time in the IDE a more pleasant experience:
- Are you using bookmarks in your code yet? They work in both the PML and HTML, and you can place them by typing Ctrl+[number]. So Ctrl+1, 2, 3, etc. Then you can go to a bookmark by using Alt + [number]. You can also place unnumbered bookmarks using Ctrl+F2, and cycle through these by pressing F2.
- And how often do you use the previews? If you're working in the HTML, they're pretty handy.... if only you didn't have to figure out which one to use... Well, you don't! Just press Shift+F5 and WebSmart will figure out which preview is the best one to use to present your segment, and if the segment isn't included in any preview, it is displayed on its own.
- And if you really do prefer to just see your program run instead of using the previews, you can press F6 to save and generate, and F5 to launch it.
- There are also a few tricks for quickly jumping between segments: F12 will jump from HTML to PML and back again, and the familiar Alt+Tab moves between HTML segments. And in the latest version of WebSmart, you can right-click anywhere in the HTML segment tabs to present a list of segments to select and jump to.
- F7 is another useful shortcut, to validate your HTML or PML, and if you have just coded a few hundred lines that look like they were written in prose, a quick F9 will format the indention and layout of the code to look good.
- Make sure you're familiar with all the right-click options in the HTML: you can insert HTML tags, as well as links, forms, colors and even calendars (whoops, that one won't be available until you get version 6).
- Another right-click option available is to right-click and drag a field and place it in your HTML. When you do this (instead of left-clicking and dragging), WebSmart places an input box for the field.
- You've noticed that down in the bottom left of your IDE window is a list of 'snippets'. But have you started using them? Snippets are like a giant clipboard where you can save unlimited entries, and they'll save you lots of time when it comes to re-typing chunks of HTML and PML you use often.
- And finally, this isn't really the same kind of shortcut as the others, but rather a programming technique: did you know that you can embed PML directly into your HTML? All you have to do is wrap the code in <% and %> tags (v. 6), and type your code! The IDE will even correctly format and color-code the PML you add. This is an invaluable technique in making sure that programming events happen at the right time when your various pages are loading, and can save you many headaches if you're struggling to synchronize HTML and PML events.
Those are the ones that we use here all the time. And by the way, if you find that there's something that you're doing over and over again, and for which you wish there was a shortcut, drop us an email and let us know.
Clover 1.5 Feature Profile: New Graph Wizard Options
New graph wizard screens in Clover 1.5 make creating graphs and charts easier to understand and design.
The first change you'll notice is that now your field selection is the same as in other templates; we have eliminated the 'special' version of the fields selection, where you had to select one of your fields from a dropdown and add another to a list. So now at the field selection all you need to do is pick all the fields you want to use anywhere in your program.
Following the field prompt, Clover presents this new wizard screen:
This is the prompt where you now select the x-axis and y-axis (or equivalent) fields for your graph, which can be any of the fields you selected initially. In the example above we have chosen our Customer Number field for the x-axis, and are in the process of choosing the Order Total field for the y-axis.
Support for Multi-series Graphs
Clover 1.5 also includes a new multi-series graph template where you select three fields on the wizard page - the x-axis and y-axis as normal, plus the multi-series element. Here is an illustration of the wizard prompt when you're creating a multi-series graph:
For an example of what a multi-series graph looks like, you can review the recently added WebSmart example program 112. This example program was actually built in WebSmart (which also includes SmartCharts).
Clover 1.5 is now in beta, along with WebSmart 6.
Nexus 3.04 (Beta) Available
Nexus 3.04 is now available for download. If you would like to download and install the latest version of Nexus, please visit our web site to request it.
Nexus 3 includes exciting changes in several main areas, including the Enterprise Content Manager (ECM) and group management areas. We have also recently added a new SmartCharts portlet type, which allows you to easily include in your web site any of several types of dynamic graphs and charts. There is also an entirely new skins feature, a long list of user interface additions and enhancements, and a greatly improved calendar. For a more detailed overview of the features, please refer to the article in the April Tech Update. 
Participate in the Nexus 3 Beta!
For further information about the Nexus Beta, please contact Technical Support, or fill out the Nexus 3 Beta Request Form. By participating in the beta, you'll get early access to all these new features (all of which have been up and running in our internal portal for several months now), and be in an ideal position to request modifications or further enhancements to better suit your own usage of the product.
If you have any questions about the upcoming release, or any of the new features, please contact Technical Support.
Catapult 6 Feature Profile: Using Call-Out Programs
A little-known Catapult feature is the ability to add external program calls to your grab rules. Using call-out programs has been profiled on our web site for some time now, but we recently ran into an interesting example of its usage that we thought we would share with you - it might give you ideas on how you could also take advantage of this feature.
Normally, call-out programs are used to retrieve values from iSeries files, which you return to the Catapult grab rule. For example, if you don't want to replicate the contact information for all your customers in a Catapult distribution list, you may elect to set up your grab rule to instead retrieve a distribution email address from an iSeries file. However, in the situation we recently worked through, our customer needed to call an FTP program to put some Catapulted documents onto an external server, and didn't need to receive any values back into the grab rule.
So while the call-out feature isn't currently intended for this type of functionality, we did make it work, as follows:
- We added the call-out program entry, passing the necessary values to perform the FTP transfer. In this case, they needed to submit a job to run a few minutes after the poller finished its cycle.
- However, they ran into one hurdle: the call-out feature in Catapult is primarily designed to receive, and use, a parameter. The reason for this is that so Catapult will run as efficiently as possible, we've coded the Catapult Poller to only execute the call-out program if the returned value is being used in the rule. To work around this requirement, our customer simply returned a blank parm and appended the blank replacement value (&B0) to the file name, which had no effect on the rule other than to bypass the validation checking for whether the parm was being used.
Once they did this, everything worked just as they needed.
We're always happy to see our software used in new and creative ways, and this caught our attention. In upcoming releases we plan to make this feature even more flexible, to accommodate this type of situation and others.
Support for using call-out programs is another reason for you to be using the most current version of Catapult. Catapult 6 is currently in the final stages of its beta, and will be released soon. If you have any questions about Catapult 6 please contact Technical Support.
New WebSmart Example Program: Using SQL to Auto-increment.
The WebSmart support group has added another new WebSmart example programs to our library:
- Example 116 - Auto-incrementing using SQL. This example illustrates how you can use SQL to add auto-increment functionality to your programs in Add mode.
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
There have been no new software updates in the last few weeks.
© 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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