Thoughts on WDSC for iSeries

Ok, I've been playing around with WDSC for iSeries for a few weeks now and
think I've got a handle on it.

Here are some of my thoughts ... I'll *TRY* and cast these as critical
comments, but most of them have been fairly big annoyances to me.

1. The remote system explorer has a real nice library list view so you can
see what's on your current edit / execution session's library list.  Since
this is a "List", I assumed that I could add and remove from the list
easily.  Not so, first there is no ADD function, and if you right click on a
library list entry, and select DELETE ... it will try and delete the library
from the iSeries you are connected to.  NOT good.  This almost tripped me
up.

2. Command prompting for compile commands needs a lot of work ... I've
submitted a few PMR's WRT this.  IBM seems to be fairly responsive on this,
which gives me hope.

3. The compile commands themselves have a lot of requirements that are *NOT*
documented (at least nowhere I could find).  Did you know that, if you want
to use your own command to compile an object in WDSC, you must have a SRCMBR
parameter and an OPTION(*EVENTF) or OPTION(*SRCDBG)?  If your compile
command has the smarts to figure out how to compile a source member WDSC
won't pick up on the fact that the compile succeeds or fails unless these
parameters are specified.

4. Also on the compile commands ... if your user written compile command
doesn't send the appropriate message back to the correct spot in the call
stack, WDSC won't send a message back to the user.

5. If you stay connected to your remote system for an extended period of
time, the system will forget about your library list.  I assume this is
because the host RSE job disconnects after a period of inactivity and
doesn't know to re-establish the library list when you reconnect.

6. When creating a iSeries project, what is a "Build Command"?  In the
java/c++ world, this makes a lot of sense, but not in the iSeries / RPG
world.

7. In the "iSeries Jobs/Your jobs" section of the remote system explorer,
why bother listing all the ended jobs if I can't do anything with them?  At
minimum I would want to be able to view the spooled output.

8. The "iSeries Objects/Your libraries", "Your objects", and "Your members"
sections seems to be more prominent than they really need to be.  I would
probably use them to setup the filters once or twice a week (maybe month).
Perhaps they should be relegated to the properties for the connection?

9. Being able to show items in a filter set in a table view is nice, but
it's pretty useless if you can't do anything with the items in the table
view.  I would like to see the ability to view the members / objects / etc
in a table view, and be able to do everything I can when they are in the
tree view.  A table view is a more 'natural' way for an iSeries developer to
work.

10. Creating new source members is pretty awkward ... I would like to see
the ability to click on a filter set and select "Add Member", which would
create a source member in the appropriate src-pf.

That's what I've got so far ... probably more to come.

david

--
David Gibbs
Sr. Software Engineer / R&D / MKS Inc., www.mks.com
Lombard, IL, USA; tel: 630-495-2108; fax: 630-495-3591
Build Better Software