Banded Report Writer Revealed – Unpacking CFG_OIBRW
The OpenInsight Banded Report Writer (BRW) is the proverbial phoenix of reporting tools for our beloved development environment. Many fondly recall the Report Designer, a fairly robust reporting tool that shipped with the 16-bit version of OpenInsight. It was our first taste of a true WYSIWYG reporting tool…and it was banded. Regrettably, the source code went MIA prior to Revelation Software’s transfer to WinWin Solutions, Inc. This left us with a tool that still worked, but it could not be supported nor updated to work properly with the 32-bit version of OpenInsight. The next version of this tool was released in OpenInsight v8.0. It was an ambitious project, if only because it attempted to build upon one of Revelation’s prime directives at the time: build tools within the toolset itself. The final result bore much resemblance to the capable Report Builder (an R/LIST interface, written in BASIC+). As such, it showed some promise. Alas, this tool never succeeded, despite efforts to address various problems through OpenInsight v9.21.
SRP Editor – Service Modules & Metadata
As alluded to in our pre-Christmas release of version 2.7 of the SRP Editor, I drew attention to a new (well, partially new) feature referred to as metadata. Of course, the term metadata is well known, especially to those who work with information technology. Simply put, metadata means “data about data”. OpenInsight developers use metadata all the time in the form of Data Dictionaries.
So how does the SRP Editor support metadata? What kind of data would the SRP Editor be describing? Even better, how will this benefit you as a user of the SRP Editor? Great questions. Let’s spend some time exploring the answers.
SRP Editor 2.7 Released
As promised in our recent holiday newsletter, the next version of the SRP Editor has been released today. We have updated the version history page so you can go now to check out all of the latest changes.
One enhancement of particular note is documented as “updated service-oriented metadata to support routines that can access other service modules“. Most of you are probably wondering what that means. The only other place where similar information can be found is in the history log for v2.6 where we “added support for displaying autocomplete dropdowns for service-oriented stored procedures using user-defined metadata.” Again, I’m pretty certain this still doesn’t help. That’s okay. We never highlighted this enhancement before now because we really wanted to get the final set of features implemented first. This was accomplished with the SRP Editor 2.7. We are excited to present these features to you, but to do this justice it requires its own blog post. We’ll have this article published in just a few days so keep an eye out for it.
There Can Be Only One
Our first ActiveX Control was written in 2002: SRP Button Control. It was released in a stand-alone file called SRPButton.ocx. Not long thereafter came SRPTab.ocx and SRPPicture.ocx. Over the months, each new control brought a new OCX file along with it.
Not long after the SRP EditTable Control was released, we began to realize that managing multiple OCX files was a bit of a customer support chore. Thus, SRP.OCX was born. This single file housed all our controls in a single file, yet customers could license controls individually. It was the best of all worlds, or so we hoped.
Mind the Defaults – UD 5.0 Benchmarks – Part 1
There is a lot of excitement around the release of the Universal Driver 5.0 and it’s new features. This article will be the first of several that analyzes the performance and operation of the new product against the current Universal Driver 4.7.
Manufacturer benchmarks are a black art with comparisons done to test the product under the best possible circumstances to highlight product superiority. The benchmark test in this article is independent of the manufacturer and designed not to introduce un-needed complexity or variables. Default options are selected whenever possible during setup and the test is run directly on the server.
Asynchronous HTTP Requests
Overview
There is no end in sight to the growth of online content and web services. Sooner or later your application will need to communicate with an online service for new functionality. You may need to interface your OpenInsight based application with a web API or simply need to download a file. This blog article walks through extending the built-in functionality to provide a more feature rich user experience.
OpenInsight 10 – Universal Driver 5.0 (aka UD Grows Up!)
When we wrote our article stating the reasons we were looking forward to the 2015 Revelation User’s Conference (and why everyone else should have planned to go as well) we noted one of the more intriguing enhancements was related to RevRCL (aka Universal Driver) and its ability to restore clients in case of a network disconnection. As it turns out, this was only one of many welcome enhancements that will come as a part of the new Universal Driver 5.0.
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