IET and Broadcom are delighted to announce the availability of a new generation feature in IET's Studio Developer which uses the recently provided code generation APIs for CA Gen.

Studio Developer is an add-on module for CA Gen that provides a modern and intuitive user interface based on Eclipse, with notably a new action diagrammer with features that have been on most CA Gen developer's wish list for some time, including keyboard driven entry, an undo/redo capability, auto-suggest / complete coding aids, more flexible editing of statements, and much more. There is also an improved UI Designer, a powerful Model Explorer, and a high level of compatibility with the legacy Gen toolset, so it is very easy to use by both experienced and new CA Gen developers.

One limitation until now has been a lack of generation support from the local model. To address this, Broadcom and IET have collaborated on the development of new workstation APIs for code generation which have enabled us to support code generation from within Studio Developer.

The new release of Studio Developer with code generation support is now available for beta testing. If you are interested in participating in the beta test of Studio Developer's code generation capability, please contact me via email: darius.panahy@iet.co.uk.

Earlier this year we launched the IET Support Centre web site as the place to download software, view known problems, raise issues and also subscribe to email notifications.

More recently the IET Community was launched which is where we now post news items and which also provides a subscription feed capability.

To make it easier to manage your access to these sites and also manage which news items you wish to subscribe to, we have decided to merge the user accounts so that you now logon to the IET Support Centre using your IET Community email address and password.

From now on we will only post news items and product updates on the community site, so if you wish to receive emails when posts are made to any of the forums, please subscribe to these. The Tips and Techniques forum includes a post on how to do this.

IET are pleased to announce a new feature on our web site, the IET Community.

IET Community is a bulletin board where we be posting our news and tips, replacing the News page on our web site and the IET Blog.

More importantly though, it is also a discussion forum where we actively encourage all of our customers and partners to contribute


The background to setting up this new community is that we feel a greater sharing of ideas and resources would be of benefit to you all: our customers. We have recently had a number of discussions with some of you over various topics including DevOps, web services and best practice. And whilst IET has always prided itself on the level of support and advice we offer, (which means that there has not been the need for a community forum to handle product support issues or advice), our recent discussions on interesting topics like DevOps and product integrations have made us also reflect that there is a lot of potential out there for sharing your own valuable experiences, knowledge and perspectives with others: be it current challenges you are facing or taking advantage of new technologies and techniques.

We want to open up access to as many as possible and so please publicise the site to all of your CA Gen developers and support staff.  We hope that this community becomes a useful and valuable resource and helps promote improvements in all of our use of CA Gen, so don’t be shy – get posting!  

To allow the community to be used by anyone, regardless of whether they are an IET customer or not, it does require a separate login, but this is a simple process using the Register button on the Community home page.

Please note that the IET Community does not replace or change the existing support process, so please continue to send support requests via email, phone or the IET Support Centre.

1) Register / Logon to view the discussion forums. Whilst you can view the News and Tips forum as a guest, to be able to view the discussion forums we ask that you register.

2) If you want to receive an email notification for new postings, you can subscribe by clicking on the 'Subscribe to this forum' link.

   

3) If you want to receive notifications of replies to threads, then you should subscribe to the thread using the 'Subscribe to this thread' link at the bottom of the thread posting.

4) Visit the User Control Panel (User CP) to review your settings.

If you want to insert an image into a post, first upload the image as an attachment, then you can use the Insert Into Post button beside the attachment to insert the image into the post.

To upload an attachment, scroll down to the Attachments section of the post, use the Choose Files button to select the image file

   

 and then press the Add Attachment button. Once this is done, position your cursor in the post text where you want the image and press the Insert into Post button beside the attachment.

   

We encountered a problem recently where some code worked fine on our main Oracle test system but did not work correctly on z/OS DB2.

We could not see anything wrong, so ran the code in trace using xTrace and it was then that it was noticed that there was a LIMIT 1 clause set on a READ EACH properties. This limits the rows returned to 1, but only for MS/SQL or DB2. The statement should not have had the property set, but had been copied from another READ EACH that did have the LIMIT since there was an ESCAPE after the first READ and hence it worked correctly in all databases.

This highlights the danger of using properties that affect the results set, for example, LIMIT or DISTINCT since these are not visible to the designer when viewing the action diagram.

My recommendation would be that if you decide to use these properties, add a NOTE statement indicating this above the statement. This will act as a warning if the statement is copied, and also should also indicate that the properties might need modifying.


Originally posted on the IET Gen Development Blog

When flowing between windows in a Gen GUI application, it is good to have the window pop-up quickly, even if the data is not populated immediately, as this gives the user the feeling that something is happening.

If you put too much logic inside the Open event of the window, this perception changes because the window does not get physically displayed until the end of the Open event, thus giving the illusion that the application has hung, crashed or simply disappeared.

We’ve found that a good practise is to minimise the amount of logic (especially server calls) performed in the Open event, and if necessary use a TIREVENT within the Open event to trigger another event where the longer processing is performed. The window will then get displayed after the Open event so the user can at least see it is alive.


Originally posted on the IET Gen Development Blog

A customer recently requested a new feature for the Studio Developer Action Diagram editor.

They wanted the ability to add bookmarks into the action diagram so that they could quickly and easily move between different sections. For example, if you have to edit code in different places and move up  and down between them, rather than trying to find the locations by scrolling up and down, it is much easier to place a couple of bookmarks and then jump between them.

You can now add bookmarks using either the menu or a shortcut key and jump to the next bookmark with a shortcut key (or menu).

In the example below, three bookmarks have been added with their location shown in blue in the right hand locator. The third bookmark is the MOVE statement shown with the highlighting.

When considering upgrades of GuardIEn and/or CA Gen to a new release, a common misconception is that the upgrade has to be implemented all at once with the upgrade of the CSE and GuardIEn software, regeneration of code and deployment of new versions of workstation software all happening as part of the upgrade and development frozen until complete.

For example, you might currently be using CA Gen 8.5 (or earlier) for the encyclopaedia and generated code and wish to upgrade to 8.6. However not all of the applications are able to regenerate and retest their code as part of the upgrade process at present and hence the choice is either to postpone the upgrade or install a new encyclopaedia server and database and selectively transfer projects across to the new encyclopaedia.

This can be further complicated when you wish to use one release of CA Gen (e.g. 8.6) for developing a new release of the application and also maintain the production code using an earlier release (e.g. 8.5). If you implement a new encyclopaedia for the new release, migrating changes between models becomes much more difficult when they are in separate encyclopaedias.

There is an alternative...

The flexibility offered by GuardIEn to generate and install the application code it is sometimes overlooked when considering options for upgrades, especially for upgrading the application code.

GuardIEn can be configured to use multiple versions of the CA Gen generators from a single encyclopaedia. In the above example, you could upgrade the existing encyclopaedia server to CA Gen 8.6 and configure GuardIEn to generate the code using 8.6 or earlier versions of the generators. This would then allow you to selectively upgrade the application code for individual models at at time of your choice rather than as part of the Gen upgrade project.

Similarly you can upgrade the GuardIEn server software to the latest release (e.g. 8.7) but also have earlier releases available as well. This then allows you to phase the roll-out of the GuardIEn client software to the developer's workstations.

IET are able to assist in the planning and execution of both GuardIEn and CA Gen upgrades. If you would like to discuss how we might be able to help, please get in touch.

A few posts have been copied across from the blog, but most haven't, so to view the archive of posts on the blog, visit http://ietgen.blogspot.com/