RE: Reusable module repository -- RPG400-L

Some very good thoughts Aaron.

Aaron Bartell wrote on 07/07/2006 09:23:49 AM:

Here's how I would do RPGDocs if I started today. 
 (... an extensive plan - see below)


Sounds pretty reasonable.  I think maybe configurable tags could get kind 
of hairy ... unless the configuration is of the 'map your tags to our 
pre-defined tags' variety.  Other tools of this type seem to force 
pre-defined tags - but this would be a nice feature if it can be designed 
in at the beginning.

The best part about this is that a source crawl tool has most likely

already

been written to do something like this, we would just have to mod it to

go

over RPG.


Mihael mentioned Doxygen, which seems pretty nice.  It even seems to have 
a way to add in other languages without to much trouble - of course I say 
that with just a quick peek at the website.  I have no experience with 
porting C++, but I would be interested in learning.

Anyways, those are my thoughts on the matter.  My forecast for free time

to

do something like this in the near future is rainy at best.


Me too, which is why I hope there will be enough interest to make starting 
an open-source project worthwhile.  If there are enough contributors I 
hope there will be enough momentum to keep things moving.


Adam



--- Extensive plan starts here! ----

1. Determine what meta-data I was going to collect and how I was going

to

get it.
   1a. Files used
   1b. H spec options use
   1c. Variable name declarations (good for search if you want to find
all programs where INV# is used)
      1d. Procedure names
      1e. Sub routine names
   1f. Etc...
2. Determine what data you want to collect that is more on the comments
side.  For instance many programmers put comment blocks above each sub

proc

and sub routine and also at the top of each program (see below).  Each

shop

has different naming conventions for denoting or describing the info in

the

comment block (e.g. @Program, Program Name:, Program Name...:, etc) so

these

values would have to be configurable, again, I would use XML to

configure

it.  The hard part with this is knowing when the data stops (i.e. what
happens when "@Description -" spans multiple lines?)

//**************************************************************************

*****************
      // @Program - BFXML (Build From XML)
      // @Author - Aaron Bartell
      // @Creation Date - 2006-07-07
      // @Description - Dynamically build an RPG program that will parse

the

specified xml file.
      // @Notes - ALB 2006-07-07 This should go out in the next release
(v1.2).

//**************************************************************************

***************** 

3. Determine how to catalog the information after it has been "search"

or

"crawled".  For this I would use an xml file like the following.  The

beauty

of putting all this information in an xml document is that xml is easily
extended and can be consumed by MANY other tools out there (thinking of
Lucene http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/). 

<library name="PROD1">
  <program name="BFXML" memberName="BFXML">
  <copybooks>
    <copybook name="ErrorCp" qualifiedName="QSOURCE,ErrorCP" />
    <copybook name="UtilCp" qualifiedName="QSOURCE,UtilCP" />
  </copybooks>
  <HspecOptions>
    <Hspec keyword="dftactgrp" value="*no"/>
  </HspecOptions>
  <tables>
    <table name="CONFIGPF" [put attributes for all F spec column data]

/>

  </tables>
  <variables>
    <variable name="gError" type="datastructure" based="RXS_Error"/>
    ...
  </variables>
  <subprocedures>
    <subprocedure name="parseXML" exported="false">
      <parm name="pXmlFile" type="varying" length="256"/>
    </subprocedure>
  </subprocedures>
[there would be much more information, but you get the idea. Basically

log

anything and everything about the program]
  </program>
</library>

4. Build an XSLT (XML Stylesheet Language Translation) from the

generated

xml to a grouping of HTML files that could easily be published to a

static

site similar to JavaDocs.  Of course we would want to make it not so

static

because JavaDocs suck for searching (check out this next generation

JavaDoc

called JavaRef: http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/?p=22). No reason we

couldn't

create an application just like it for RPGDocs.

The above is just talking about searching the source and hasn't even

gotten

into processing the API's that will give you interrelations like what

other

modules are making use of module xyz.


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