Re: New RFE - Live Outline & Copybooks -- WDSCI-L

I voted for this. I think this is part and parcel of the problem of
having to incrementally interpret code that is intended to be compiled.
Not a simple problem domain.
--buck

On 1/10/2013 5:10 PM, Edmund Reinhardt wrote:

Hi Kurt,
I spent some time looking into this problem.
There are two kinds of updates to the outline view.
A Refresh update (which is also done at load time) will go out and retrieve
external database info from the host
A keystroke update can't afford to do that since we don't want to slow down
your typing. Of course we don't want to lose the information that you got
from the host before either. So we look at our parse tree from before and
if we can match the previous data structure or file that has external
information we copy it into the new tree.
The problem you were seeing was that our algorithm for determining if the
data structure has changed, was too conservative, causing it to consider a
data structure as changed, even if it just moved further down in the
source. (By the way the fact that it was in a copybook did not matter,
even moving the copy statement down was considered a change).

After some in depth analysis, I concluded that the right way to fix this
was to keep track of the external file, record, field definitions
independently of the RPG file, and data structures they become. So we will
no longer be dependent on looking for matching data structures, or files
which is always going to be a guess, but we can key on the actual external
file names.
In this way, you can continue to use the external information even if you
change an ALIAS. PREFIX, EXFMT, RENAME, IGNORE, INCLUDE, etc. keyword that
will rename or subset this information when bringing it into the RPG name
space.
You can even code new data structures and files that reference these
external files and have the information available to you.

I believe this will be a much better algorithm and provide a much more
usable experience.

For others listening in please vote for the RFE, as I would like to get
this enhancement in. I put this note into the RFE response as well, to
document the plan to address this.

Regards,

Edmund (E.H.) Reinhardt
COBOL IDE on AIX, DDS, WebFacing, System i Application Development,
Rational Developer for Power

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From: "Anderson, Kurt" <KAnderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Rational Developer for IBM i / Websphere Development Studio
Client for System i & iSeries (wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx)'"
<wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Date: 01/10/2013 03:42 PM
Subject: [WDSCI-L] New RFE - Live Outline & Copybooks
Sent by: wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Hey all,

I don't know if you've ever noticed copybook definitions disappearing from
the Live Outline/CA, but here's a RFE to fix it. I did enter it as a
Service Request, but was told this was by design.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=30126

-Kurt Anderson
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