scotto@crash.cts.com (Scott O'Connell) (08/01/90)
I've been using Informix 4GL(compiled, NOT RDS) on my SCO Xenix 386 machine
for about 2 1/2 years. I have also been under maintainence and have upgraded
as new releases have become available. I just ordered the new 4.0[0]
releases of SQL, 4GL and the SE engine. I have some questions about the 4.0
release that I was wondering if someone could post a rundown of new
features, known major bugs, etc.
Here are a couple specific questions:
BUGS
====
1. There was a problem when you used a FOREACH with FOR UPDATE and
then updated WHERE CURRENT OF. The problem (as I recall) was that
after 64 iterations that the first variable would be corrupted.
2. When the user would exit a program by pressing DEL, the DEL would
also be passed to the operating system.
3. The programmers environment wouldn't allow you to use sub-directorys
for source modules. If everything was in the current directory then
there was no problem. It was for me as we had too many files for my
personal taste.
I also had some termcap problems that were identified as problems in
4GL. I even have a bug number that one, somewhere in the Informix
folder....
I have work arounds for all of these things. I'm just wondering if they
held true to their promise to me that these would *all* be resolved in the
next "major" release (which was to be 3.00 back then).
FEATURE REQUEST
===============
I had asked for a couple features way back when and was told by
Informix that they would be evaluated and implimented if deemed of
any value. I was called by someone from Informix a few months
later and told there was reason to include my ideas in the next
release. I don't know who called me and I don't know what became of
the ideas. At the time I was so frustrated with technical support
that I didn't give it much thought after finding a workaround.
1. Being able to choose the order of multi column screen forms. Let
me explain better by saying we needed more than 13 or so line items
on a screen but they weren't very wide. It looked like this:
[01] [part_number ] [qty]
.
.
[13] [part_number ] [qty]
I then tried multiple columns that looked like this:
[01] [part_number] [qty] [02] [part_number] [qty] [03] [part_number] [qty]
.
.
[37] [part_number] [qty] ...etc
I've added the numbers so you can see how the data was treated. Everything
went from left to right and then to the new screen row. While I still did
this, it was, and still is, very confusing to the users. It is better than
having to scroll a screen, though. My request was that you could specify
the order in which data appeared on the screen. I wanted columns to go
from top left to bottom left, top next to bottom next, etc.
2. This one had to do with a screen form and wanting to AUTONEXTROW as
I called it. Technical support MANAGEMENT came up with a workaround
that works really nice, but it should be a standard feature IMHO and
theirs. (Actually they couldn't believe there wasn't a way to do this
without the workaround)
[qty] [part_number] [vendor] [dummy]
NOTE: "dummy" = noentry;autonext
What I wanted to do was have the user choose if the vendor was a
constant before entering the input_array. This way they could just
type qty [enter] part_number [enter]. After the part_number field
I wanted to advance to the next row automatically. What we came up
with was:
AFTER FIELD part_number
IF vendor_constant THEN
NEXT FIELD dummy
This is a good workaround an our data entry people love it as it's
very fast. (as compared to what they had before)
If anyone has upgraded and can let me know if you've used an of these
things I'd appreciate hearing from you. I'm still learning daily and
there may be better ways around some of these problems.
Thanks
--
Scott O'Connell - N6ZEK UUCP: {nosc, hplabs!hp-sdd}!crash!ipars!scotto
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