Re: Has anyone done any processing with OA and WORKSTN device types?

On Jun 27, 2011, at 10:19 AM, rpg400-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Thanks, Joe for the explanation of why the handlers have to be quite
proprietary. It is surely understandable, unless open source
handlers some how get used in some product. My point was more simply
about the limitation of the venders liking to use the word
non-proprietary in the context of their products. That is true for
parts of their implementation

Couple of points. First of all (sad as it makes me to say so) unless IBM does away with the idiotic charges for OA there will probably not be be much open source effort. Although I'm told there are some collaborative efforts going on in Europe. The whole point of OS is to collaborate and share code. If there's a pre-req fee before you can join the development effort or even use the OS software, how many OS developers will bother? More people need to add their votes to the requirements to change this being gathered by COMMON - there are already a large number there - add your voice.

Second - and more to the point of this post. IBM, in an attempt to get OA out of the door ASAP, did not define a standard for storing metadata regarding the interface. Many things are needed ranging from which fields overlap, which indicators control what function, how has a particular field been mapped to the UI, etc. etc. On the whole this is a good thing as any IBM standard would have been horribly over-engineered. Right now there is an effort underway among the OA vendors and other interested parties to define a storage mechanism and standards for such metadata. In the intervening period each vendor will continue to do their own thing.

Writing a handler to provide an interface to a specific program/screen combination is doable as you are able to write the handler with full awareness of what is needed. Writing a generic handler, as the vendors do, that can deal with any combination is, as Joe noted, a much more difficult task. I wouldn't want to try it - although I have written a few handlers for other purposes.

One of the points raised by Joe (calling from one program to another when both use subfiles etc.) is not quite as difficult as it might be because of the simply elegant way in which OA handles state information. As long as any arrays etc. related to the subfile are stored within the file specific storage area then RPG effectively takes care of it for you as whenever the handler is called you are immediately connected to the file specific storage. This also makes it a simple task to write a handler that can be used for multiple files in a single program.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com