ftp.robelle3000.ai 2014/2014.06.ftp.robelle3000.ai.tar/ftp.robelle3000.ai/newsletter/2000/w2000-02.txt

Text File | 2000-04-23 | 28KB | 715 lines

What's Up, DOCumentation?



       Robelle Consulting Ltd.
       Unit 201, 15399-102A Ave.
       Surrey, B.C.  Canada  V3R 7K1
       Toll-free:    1-888-ROBELLE
                    (1-888-762-3553)
       Phone:       [phone]
       Fax:         [phone]
       E-mail: [e-mail]
       Web: www.robelle.com

Date:  April 2000

From:  Robert M. Green, CEO
       David J. Greer, President
       Jennifer Franklin, Editor pro tem

To:    Users of Robelle Software

Re:    News of the HP 3000 and of HP-UX, 2000 #2

    What You Will Find in This News Memo:

       New Technology Empowers Qedit for Windows Users
       Introducing Suprtool 4.3
       Calculating the Difference Between Any Two Dates
       Robelle's Web-Enabling Think Tank
       The HP e3000 Is Reality, Not Hype
       Tired of the Command Interpreter? Drop It!
       Upcoming Events In 2000
       Inventory Reduction Sale
       New Web Site for Robelle Distributor in Australia
       Speed Demon Saves Hours in Only Fifteen Minutes
       Adding A Sequential Number to A Data File
       Using Regular Expression to Create HTML Headings
       Whose Line Is It Anyway?
       This Newsletter Available by E-mail

New Technology Empowers Qedit for Windows Users
===============================================

System Commands and the Qedit Scripting Language Provides Users with a
Highly Integrated and Customizable Solution

The ability to execute HP host system commands from within the Qedit for
Windows client has been the most popular customer request, echoing a
longtime favorite of Qedit for HP e3000 and HP-UX users. This powerful
functionality provides a Windows development environment that is
strongly integrated with users' HP systems. For example, host commands
such as Listf or Showjob can be executed and controlled directly from
the Qedit client, with results appearing in the host command dialog box.
There is no need to switch back and forth from the editor to the MPE or
HP-UX session. Similarly, developers can write or modify source code and
then compile their programs directly from the Qedit client. Compile
error messages will appear in the dialog box for convenient fixing.

Not to be overshadowed by host commands, the Qedit Scripting Language
(QSL) will also be released in Qedit for Windows Version 4.9. QSL allows
users to control the powerful underlying Qedit file objects and file
operations. This means that any repetitive task that has an editing or
program development component can be automated with a Qedit script.
Users can create their own scripts for custom editing needs or simply
invoke scripts that have been set up for them to facilitate
organizational procedures. What's more, scripts can be invoked in
real-time or scheduled for batch execution. Says David Greer, president
of Robelle and lead software architect, "This innovative new technology
offers a level of customization and process automation above and beyond
anything found in other Windows editors."

Used in concert, these huge advancements in Qedit for Windows equal a
sum greater than their parts in allowing users to invoke host commands
through scripting. For example, contributed Qedit scripts such as "COBOL
Compile" or "C Compile" invoke the HP compiler on the e3000 or HP-UX and
return the results to the host commands dialog box for further
processing.

To help you get started with QSL, a library of contributed scripts will
be included with the new release. Also, a collection of scripts will be
available on the Robelle website at

    http://www.robelle.com/support/qwin/scripts/

In addition to the regular Qedit for Windows user manual, an additional
QSL user manual will be distributed with the new version. Finally,
Robelle Technical Support is available to help users get started with
scripting. Please do not hesitate to contact Tech Support at
1-888-ROBELLE.

How Do I Get the Latest Version?

Supported customers will need versions 4.9 of the Qedit Server Module
and the Qedit client. Please contact Robelle to request this latest
upgrade. If you are not already licensed for Qedit for Windows and would
like to try it, free thirty-day demos are available at

    http://www.robelle.com/products/qwin/info.html

[Nicky Gunther]


Introducing Suprtool 4.3
========================

Highlights Include Variable Substitution and Support for Large Files in
MPE 6.5

Suprtool 4.3 will hit the desks of supported North American customers at
the beginning of May (overseas customers can expect their update about a
month later). With the release of MPE 6.5, HP e3000 customers will enjoy
a huge increase in the filesize capacity of the e3000. Robelle's
technical team has been working closely with Hewlett-Packard and the
AMISYS healthcare application vendor, HBOC Payor Solutions Group, to
make Suprtool compatible with much bigger files. Specifically, the
capabilities of Suprtool have been increased from the old limit of 4 GB
to the greatly expanded limit of 128 GB - an order of 32 times.
Similarly, on HP-UX, the new Suprtool release offers support for bigger
filesizes for all three modules of Suprtool/UX: Suprtool, Suprlink, and
STExport. Each of these modules can now support files that contain up to
2.1 billion records.

Many Suprtool users will be happy to hear that the second major
enhancement in Suprtool 4.3 is "variable substitution" thus closing one
of the most popular enhancement requests ever submitted for Suprtool.
Variable substitution allows the use of CI variables directly inside
Suprtool, Suprlink, and STExport, eliminating the need to define
temporary use files to handle these tasks.

Additionally, this year's release incorporates more arithmetic functions
on numeric data types. For example, Suprtool now allows you to truncate
numbers instead of rounding. Suprtool will also compute the absolute
value of a number.

To finalize Suprtool's date functionality, PHDate and Julian Day Number
have been added to the list of supported date types. With Julian Day
support and the $DAYS command, Suprtool can now compute the number of
days between any two dates.

[Nicky Gunther]


Calculating the Difference Between Any Two Dates
================================================

Suprtool now has the ability to select records based on the difference
between two dates. The $DAYS function, available in Suprtool 4.3's IF
and EXTRACT commands, converts a date to a number. By converting two
dates to numbers, then subtracting one number from the other, you can
get the number of days difference between the two dates.

Example: find the orders that shipped more than a week after ordering,
and extract the order number and number of days it took to ship

    get      order-header
    item     order-date,date,yyyymmdd
    item     ship-date,date,yyyymmdd
    if       $days(ship-date) - $days(order-date) > 7
    extract  order-number
    define   number-of-days,1,2,integer
    extract  number-of-days = &
             $days(ship-date) - $days(order-date)
    ...

$DAYS converts any valid date to a Julian day number (the number of days
since 4713 BC). If a date is not valid, $DAYS returns a zero instead of
a Julian day number. Therefore it is important to be sure that the dates
are valid, or your results may not be predictable. For example, in the
example above, if an order has not yet been shipped, the SHIP-DATE field
will probably be blank, zero, or some other special value. In that case
the calculation will probably return a negative number. This may or may
not deliver the desired result, depending on what you are trying to
accomplish. To be sure of getting the right results, you need to ensure
that the date fields have valid dates. The $INVALID function of the IF
command can do this for you.

For example:

    if       not $invalid(ship-date) and &
             not $invalid(order-date) and &
             $days(ship-date) - $days(order-date) > 7

For more information, see the documentation that accompanies the
Suprtool 4.3 update, or call us if you have any questions.

[Mike Shumko]


Robelle's Web-Enabling Think Tank
=================================

Traditionally, Robelle is known as a product or tools company. In fact,
many customers use the word "Robelle" interchangeably with our product
names, e.g. "We're installing Robelle tomorrow" versus "We're installing
Qedit and Suprtool tomorrow."

In 2000, we're aiming to change this product- or tool-focused perception
of Robelle to a whole solutions focus. We're working harder and digging
deeper to uncover customer problems and striving to recommend the
smartest solutions. Our solutions may be built on a variety of different
hardware and software technologies, whatever combination makes the most
sense in accomplishing a customer's unique objective. One of our
strengths is knowing how to piece together - and, indeed, where to find
- all the technology components and people resources required to solve a
given IT problem. We are turning these skills toward the e-business
arena with our new "Web-Enabling Think Tank", a free service to our
customers until October 31st, 2000.

Our new Think Tank offer gives you access to Robelle's complete team of
technical experts who will study the e-business challenges facing your
company. Whatever your particular challenge may be, we promise to
deliver to you three pieces of advice that will, in turn, help you
deliver a smart solution to your company. Our aim is to give you
down-to-earth trustworthy advice and use our think tank synergies to
give you a head start. If you would like to submit a problem or
challenge to the Robelle Think Tank, please visit

    http://www.robelle.com/couponbook/

For those of you who have already converted existing applications (or
document publishing or report generation or...) to the
Internet/Intranet, we'd love to hear your story and (with your
permission) share it with other customers in upcoming issues of What's
Up, DOCumentation? You can e-mail your story to us at

    [e-mail]

[Nicky Gunther]


The HP e3000 Is Reality, Not Hype
=================================

By now you have heard that Hewlett-Packard has renamed the HP 3000 to
the HP e3000. Some vendors make a habit of announcing new products long
before they will be delivered (if ever). In this case, however, HP is
just catching up with the 3000 customers and the enthusiastic 3000
programmers.

Starting way back in 1995 (ancient history in Internet time), Mark
Bixby, Mark Klein, Mike Yawn, Lars Appel, and many others ported the
essential Internet and Web infrastructure to MPE/iX: GNU C++, DNS, Bind,
Sendmail, Java, Perl, Apache, Java servlets, and Python.

HP 3000 customers were not slow in taking advantage of these tools.

For example, e3000 site PayMaxx offers web-based payroll services at
www.paymaxx.com. Bigwords, another e3000 site, buys and sells textbooks
at www.bigwords.com, and e3000 site Sunrider sells health products at
www.sunrider.com. According to The 3000 News Wire, "Wired magazine
recently named Wake Forest University as the most wired campus in the
US, and SRN's Web-based 3000 solution is at the heart of the Wake Forest
operations." And Information Week reports that eCandy.com plans to use
the e3000 and the MACS order processing system (and our Suprtool)
confident they can process up to 300,000 transactions a day.

With RSA working on SSL security for Apache/iX and with MPE/iX 6.5
upgrading to Java 2 (actually version 1.2.2) plus JDBC and LDAP client
capability, the e3000 is a platform you can apply in a number of
interesting ways.

If you are just starting out with web-enabling, activate the Apache web
server on your MPE/iX system and write some code to enable
bi-directional browser access to all your internal users. Everything you
need to know to get started is on HP's "Jazz" web site. As your
experience and needs grow, add a standalone NT, HP-UX or LINUX web
server and give your external customers, suppliers and colleagues access
to your MPE/iX databases through ODBC.

Using Qedit for Windows as a development front-end, you can even use the
Internet to easily maintain your e3000 web site from halfway across the
globe. At Robelle we use web pages and Qedit to do project management
for all our current projects. And with the powerful new scripting
language and host-command feature to automate Internet tasks, perhaps we
should rename it the "eQedit"?

Links:

3000 News Wire on e3000:
    http://www.3000newswire.com/subscribers/e-3000announce-0002.html

Information Week on e3000:
    http://www.informationweek.com/773/hp.htm

Jazz, the Latest Internet Technology for e3000:
    http://jazz.external.hp.com/

About PayMaxx:
    http://www.businessservers.hp.com/solutions/internet/CSY000FP6.html

[Bob Green]


Tired of the Command Interpreter? Drop It!
==========================================

In the last issue, Neil Armstrong introduced MPE/iX 6.5. This is the
first in a series of articles describing some of the new features in
MPE/iX 6.5. [Ed.]

The first new feature that I find interesting is the NEWCI command,
which is known as CI elimination. The NEWCI command is similar to the
Run command in that it executes a program as a child process. However
after launching the program, the NEWCI command will eliminate the CI
process for that session.

This will help reduce the number of processes on heavily loaded high-end
systems. This new feature allows for users to only have their main
application running, without having a CI running.

From your logon UDC for an individual who runs a customer application,
you could start the applications with the NEWCI command, and when they
leave the application they are logged off automatically.

    Dologon
    option logon nobreak
    file custdb=custdb.db.data
    newci customer.pub.xeq
    ******

Naturally, I was curious to see if I could use Qedit in this manner.
Because I live in Qedit all day, I rarely, if ever, require command
prompt access.

    :newci qedit.pub.robelle
    Qedit/iX. Copyright Robelle Consulting Ltd. 1977-1999.
    (Version 4.8)
    /showtime
    FRI, JAN 28, 2000, 11:31 AM
    /exit
    CPU=5. Connect=1. FRI, JAN 28, 2000, 11:31 AM.

As you can see, once you exit the program that was executed with the
NEWCI command, you are logged off automatically.

Overall the NEWCI command seems like a good solution for eliminating a
large number of processes for those users who only need application
access.

[Neil Armstrong]


Upcoming Events In 2000
=======================

What:   McKessonHBOC Meeting
When:   May 2-5
Where:  Las Vegas, Nevada
Who:    Nicky Gunther, Neil Armstrong

What:   Summit Information Systems Client Group Conference
When:   May 21-22
Where:  Maui, Hawaii
Who:    Mike Shumko

What:   Smith Gardner World Conference & Expo
When:   June 4-7
Where:  Aventura, Florida
Who:    David Greer, Marie Reimer, Mike Shumko

What:   HP World 2000 Conference & Expo
When:   September 9-14
Where:  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Who:    Bob Green, David Greer, Francois Desrochers, Nicky Gunther,
        Hans Hendriks, Marie Reimer, Tammy Roscoe


Inventory Reduction Sale
========================

We're in the process of releasing Suprtool 4.3, and we have some excess
inventory of Suprtool 4.2 user manuals. These are the same high-quality
manuals you always receive from us, just without the newest features.
Suprtool is backward compatible, so the old manuals are still quite
usable. If you would like to distribute manuals to more people around
your company, we are clearing out the old stock at US $10 each (or if
you prefer manuals of the new release, they are $20 each). To order,
call Eunice Sheehan at 1-888-ROBELLE or email Eunice at

    [e-mail]


New Web Site for Robelle Distributor in Australia
=================================================

Robelle's Australian Distributor, Michael Redmond of MRFM, is pleased to
announce his new website:

    http://www.mrfm.com.au/

Michael has worked closely with Robelle for many years. You may remember
reading his article in the September 1999 What's Up, DOCumentation?
called "An Australian Revisits Robelle". Michael was one of the
privileged visitors to the Robelle office when it was "on the farm" with
dogs, cats, horses, and not much space! Go check out the MRFM website
for more information on its products and services.


Speed Demon Saves Hours in Only Fifteen Minutes
===============================================

If you could double the speed of some of your COBOL programs in only a
few minutes, wouldn't you do it?

Speed Demon is a little-known part of Suprtool that has been around for
years, but hasn't received the attention it deserves. If you have
Suprtool, then you have Speed Demon - it's one of the standard
components of Suprtool that everybody gets at no extra charge.

Speed Demon is a replacement routine for DBGET Mode 2. If you have a
program that reads an IMAGE dataset serially, chances are that you can
speed it up substantially using Speed Demon. The program logic remains
the same; you just change the DBGET call to a Speed Demon call. That
might sound like a bit of an oversimplification, but there's really not
much more to it than that.

In general your existing program will look something like this:

    DBOPEN
    while not end-of-file do
       DBGET(base,dataset,mode-2,status,itemlist,buffer,dummy)
       do something with the record
    endwhile
    produce the report, etc.
    DBCLOSE

After you've converted it to use Speed Demon, it will look like this:

    DBOPEN
    SPDEDBINIT(base,dataset,mode-1,status,control,itemlist)
    while not end-of-file do
       SPDEDBSCAN(base,status,buffer,dummy)
       do something with the record
    endwhile
    SPDEDBSHUT(base,dataset,mode,status,dummy)
    produce the report, etc.
    DBCLOSE

Your program logic and structure remains the same. The serial DBGET is
replaced by a call to SPDEDBSCAN. Some of the DBGET parameters are moved
to SPDEDBINIT, which is called only once, before the first call to
SPDEDBSCAN. With a program that does a serial scan, the DBGET parameters
do not change from one DBGET to the next, so it does not make sense for
IMAGE to have to validate the parameters for each record. If you
serially read a million records, do you really need to specify a million
times which dataset and item list you want? With Speed Demon we set the
parameters once in the SPDEDBINIT call, moving the checking and overhead
outside the read loop. The Speed Demon code that gets executed a million
times is as lean as possible.

Speed Demon achieves its performance improvement by using the same
high-speed database scan engine that is at the core of Suprtool. Instead
of reading a record/buffer/page at a time as IMAGE does, Speed Demon
reads up to 50Kb with every disc access. That means that Speed Demon may
fetch hundreds of records with every disc read operation. Additionally,
Speed Demon uses Robelle's pre-fetch mechanism to coax the operating
system into fetching the data before Speed Demon actually needs it. This
allows the program to always be processing records instead of waiting
for I/O to complete. The result is that Speed Demon substantially
reduces the I/O overhead of the retrieval. Because I/O is the most
common bottleneck on an e3000, anything you can do to reduce the amount
of I/O will benefit the program.

You will usually find that Speed Demon can read records five times
faster than DBGET. Note that your overall program may not run five times
faster, because the rest of your processing, sorting and printing of the
records will be at the same speed as before. But cutting the overall run
time of a program in half is not unusual with Speed Demon. That's a
pretty good result from such a small investment in programming effort.

See the Speed Demon section of your Suprtool user manual for more
information, or call us if you have any questions.

[Mike Shumko]


Adding A Sequential Number to A Data File
=========================================

Recently we've received a number of calls from folks wanting to add a
sequential number to an output file in Suprtool. In other words, they'd
like the output file to contain a new field containing values 1, 2, 3,
etc. for each successive output record.

Suprtool doesn't have a built-in function for this. But here are two
ways you can achieve this.

With Suprtool
-------------

Suprtool has a "NUM" output option that will add a four-byte integer
field to the start of the output record, containing the record number of
the input record. This was originally added so that programmers could
scan large files with Suprtool, extract the record numbers of records
that required further processing, then pass those record numbers to a
3GL program that could do directed retrievals to process the
already-qualified records. When selecting a subset of records from a
large file, or from a dataset which has non-empty delete chains, the
record numbers represented in the output file will be non-sequential.
However, when copying all records from one MPE file to another, the
input record numbers will be sequential, starting with record number 0
for the first record.

    in      custs
    out     custnum,num,data
    xeq
    IN=19, OUT=19. CPU-Sec=1. Wall-Sec=1.

    :listf custs@,1
    FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-------
                      SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT
    CUSTNUM            15W  FB          19         19
    CUSTS              13W  FB          19         19

Note the new file's record length is 2 words (4 bytes) longer than the
original data file. That is because each record now has a four-byte
binary record number added to the beginning. Here's what the records
look like:

    input   custnum
    define  recno,1,4,integer
    define  data,5,26,byte
    extract recno, data
    list    standard
    xeq

    Jan 10, 2000 14:00          File: CUSTNUM             Page 1

    RECNO       DATA

             0  Thomas    Serafin
             1  Wayne     Humphreys
             2  Gordon    Oxenbury
             3  Lana      Johnston
             4  William   Kirk
             5  Walley    Nisbet
             6  Rupert    Hillstrom
             7  John      Melander
             8  Werner    Frahm
    ...etc

The record numbers start at 0 and go up by 1.

With Qedit
----------

When opening files, Qedit has to do some quick footwork to decide
whether the file is numbered or not. It does this by examining the first
few records, to see if the last 8 columns contain numbers, and whether
those numbers ascend from one record to the next. You can override this
default on the text command:

    text foobar,unnumbered

This forces Qedit to treat the file as unnumbered. In other words, Qedit
will treat the whole record as data, irrespective of whether the first
or last columns contain sequential numbers.

If we Text the file as unnumbered, we can force Qedit to Keep the file
with numbers:

    text custs,unnumbered
    set keep num on
    keep custs2

Note that the records are now 4 words (8 bytes) longer than the original
file, because an 8-digit ASCII line number was added to the end of the
records:

    listf custs@,1
    FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-------
                      SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT
    CUSTS              13W  FB          19         19
    CUSTS2             17W  FB          19         19

    Use Qedit to examine the file:

    list custs2,unnumbered {treat the line numbers as data}
        1     Thomas    Serafin         00001000
        2     Wayne     Humphreys       00002000
        3     Gordon    Oxenbury        00003000
        4     Lana      Johnston        00004000
        5     William   Kirk            00005000
        6     Walley    Nisbet          00006000
        7     Rupert    Hillstrom       00007000
        8     John      Melander        00008000
        9     Werner    Frahm           00009000
    ...etc

The line numbers are now included in the file, and can be defined as a
data field in subsequent Suprtool tasks. Note that the numbers start at
1000, and go up by 1000. This is because Qedit assumes that line numbers
have three decimal places. To make the numbers start at 1 and go up by
1, use this command before the Keep command:

    renum .001 .001

[Hans Hendriks]


Using Regular Expression to Create HTML Headings
================================================

When you have to manually convert a text file into HTML, one of the
tedious typing chores is the addition of <h1>heading tags</h1>. Regular
expressions in Qedit and Qedit for Windows can simplify this task. The
following example assumes that all headings appear on a line by
themselves.

Step 1: put "`1" "`2" etc in front of the line that will be a heading,
using `1 for heading level 1, `2 for heading level 2, etc. Instead of a
"`", you can also use any character that does not occur this way in the
file.

    `1Regular Expression Uses
    `2Assist in HTML creation
    text
    `2Find stuff
    text

Step 2: Do a search and replace using the following regular expressions.
Remember to enable regular expressions in your Change dialog or command.

Qedit for Windows command:

    Search for:    `([1-6])(.*)
    Replace with:  <h\1>\2</h\1>

Qedit command:

    /change "`([1-6])(.*)"(regexp) "<h\1>\2</h\1>" all

The text will now look like

    <h1>Regular Expression Uses</h1>
    <h2>Assist in HTML Creation</h2>
    text
    <h2>Find stuff</h2>
    text

What each part of the regular expressions mean:

`        our heading marker
([1-6])  remember the next character (if 1..6) as \1
(.*)     remember the rest of the line as \2
<h\1>    insert the start tag <h1> <h2>... The heading level number
         comes from the \1 that we remembered
\2       the actual heading, with the text remembered in \2
</h\1>   insert the end tag </h1> </h2>...

Exercise for the reader: how would you change all occurrences of
    [e-mail]
to
    [e-mail]

The answer is in the on-line version of the newsletter at

    http://www.robelle.com/library/newsletter/w2000-02.html

[Dave Lo]


Whose Line Is It Anyway?
========================

Our T1 Internet connection recently went down. Getting it back up was a
classic tale of eight hours to find the right person and ten minutes to
fix the problem.

It started before 6 a.m. when Bob Green in our Anguilla office was busy
working, connected to our Vancouver office, and the line just died. A
little after 7 a.m., I called our ISP to report the problem. By 8 a.m.
Telephone Company #1 tells me "they're on the ball" but they need to
contact Telco #2 in Calgary, because it was originally their line and
Telco #1 just acquired Telco #2.

At 9 a.m. Telco #2 says they've checked their lines and the problem is
really with Telco #3 and we should call them. I call Telco #3 but they
say that I can't initiate a trouble call because the line is owned by
our ISP. So it's back to our ISP and by 10 a.m. they have called Telco
#3.

Four hours later, a little after 2 p.m., we're finally back up. We later
learn that the guy who actually found the blown fuse wasn't notified of
the problem until 2 p.m.!

Now if only our Internet had been up, I could have e-mailed him...

The moral of the story is that if you really care about your Internet
connection being available 24x7, you need to plan for failure. For fault
tolerance, have a backup Internet connection available that you can
quickly switch to, even if it is not as fast as your regular line. In
our case, if we had had a second connection, even a slower ISDN, xDSL or
cable connection, we would not have been so concerned that our primary
line was down for eight hours.

[Paul Gobes]


This Newsletter Available by E-mail
===================================

You can have What's Up, DOCumentation? delivered directly to your
electronic InBox. You get all the same news as the print version in an
e-mail-friendly format, usually a few days before the print version gets
to you. The print version goes only to the official contact for your
company, but anybody in your company can get What's Up, Doc? by e-mail
if your support contract is current.

To subscribe, send your request to

    [e-mail]