What’s Under The Hood

Recently a customer reported that they were having trouble installing the SRP Set MinMaxInfo utility. Immediately I began to get suspicious and through a quick Q&A session discovered that the customer was attempting to install this from the three year old installer which is still available from our Downloads page. This served as a helpful reminder that our Downloads page is seriously outdated. Not only do we no longer support the original installer for the SRP Set MinMaxInfo utility, we no longer provide that as a stand-alone utility! Instead we have bundled it within our feature rich (but still free) SRP Utilities.

We realized that perhaps many OpenInsight developers might not be aware of this product. Although it was unveiled during one of our 2008 Revelation Users Conference presentations we never updated our website to make it available to the community at large. This was somewhat on purpose as it is customary for conference materials (or product in this case) to remain exclusive to conference attendees for a period of time in order to encourage more people to participate. It is now time to showcase the many tools that comprise the SRP Utilities package. To kick things off we will focus on some very useful Array functions.

The SRP Utilities help document summarizes the Array functions quite nicely:

The dynamic array is the corner stone of the BASIC+ language. Simple array manipulation is elegantly and efficiently handled by the OpenInsight engine. However, there are a few tasks that become inefficient due to complexity or limits of the interpreted language. SRP Utilities offloads much of this to the SRPUtilty.dll for easy, fast processing.

There are several array manipulation functions at your disposal. The SRP_Clean_Array function quickly removes blanks and duplicates from your array. Need to prepare a two-dimensional array for use with V119? Use SRP_Rotate_Array to turn a LIST into an ARRAY, and use SRP_Reorder_Array to rearrange your columns. Both function perform at incredible speeds not possible in the BASIC+ function. Better yet, forget using V119 and use SRP_Sort_Array instead. Doing so will eliminate the need to prepare your data altogether. And it’s fast!

So, whether you want to save time writing code that manages your dynamic arrays or whether you want to save processing time managing your dynamic arrays, the suite of SRP Utilities Array functions will provide you exactly what you need. Please note that the SRP Utilities installer (like all SRP product installers) will provide you a repository definition to make it easy for you to deploy with your own RDK updates!