PROIV Version 6 Development

Rapid Development
PROIV Version 6 includes upgraded & enhanced tools to support the rapid development and maintenance of systems.

PROIV Developer is an enhanced and re-branded version of the PROIV Version 5 development environment (VIP). It supports all the new Version 6 features and includes new Web Service creation capabilities (via the new PROIV Control Panel), logic enhancements, source code documentation and new help documentation.

PROIV Web Developer is a re-branded version of the acclaimed Coda mark-up and script language editor and debugger for easy creation of content for PROIV Active Web.

Team Support

All PROIV Developer objects are subject to source control, and are booked out to the developer working on them. Integrated backup and restore facilities safeguard source code whilst a project based releasing tool allows for the easy deployment of individual work packages or the complete runtime application.

Change Management option pack

PROIV Change Management (additional option) extends the PROIV Developer environment to provide source code control, revision control, build tracking and release management. It provides rich functionality to manage the software change process, whilst operating in a way that is minimally intrusive to the software developer.

Forms Layout

PROIV Developer includes a powerful drag and drop forms designer for rapid layout of the presentation aspects of an application for the PROIV Client.

Objects

Business rules are created in PROIV Developer by writing PROIV functions, which may be global, enabling high degrees of reuse. These business functions may then be combined to create business components (PROIV tasks) that can be interacted with by external applications. PROIV Version 6 includes a new service layer where these PROIV tasks & other objects can easily be grouped together and exposed as Web Services.

Web Services

PROIV Web Services are rapidly built by selecting the required components (PROIV tasks or Java beans) using a new point & click interface, & publishing them. PROIV does all of the “plumbing”, generating the required WSDL and providing a Web Service endpoint for calling the Web Service. For more information see our white paper PROIV Version 6 Service Orientated Architecture and Web Services.

Logic

PROIV Developer features a context aware logic editor with colour syntax highlighting. Time to load and save logic has been significantly improved in PROIV Version 6 – in a test we conducted with a large logic the time to load was five times faster than in Version 5.

Logic parsing (or checking) has been improved, with the option to defer validation of logic until save, or after each line as at present. Deferring validation until logic save has the advantage of not interrupting the programmer’s flow. In addition, all errors are marked in the margin, rather than generating intrusive dialogue boxes.

PROIV Version 6 also increases the maximum number of logics allowed in a function and their maximum length – see the PROIV Limit Revisions Briefing Paper.

String operations

Previously PROIV has supported a limited set of string manipulation operations. Other manipulations could be achieved by writing global logic routines. PROIV’s new string operations remove this need, and will also be more performant than global logic. The new verbs support case changing, strings to be compared insensitively (i.e. regardless of case), strings to be trimmed (i.e. removing spaces or other characters), and tokenisation operations.

File operation verbs

New file operation verbs are provided to manipulate files directly from within logic. Previously customers may have written their own script files (which are typically not portable across operating systems) or used unsupported features. The new verbs allow files to be created, cleared, deleted, renamed or checked for existence. Note that developers will need to ensure that other users are not accessing files when using these commands.

Improved cycle exit processing

New options provide developers better control over cycle exit processing. EODEXIT(VALIDATE) causes a cycle to process all fields remaining in the cycle including any “on focus” (before field) logic. The FORCEWRITE cycle property ensures an EOD event always writes back data (previously an EOD in the first field of a cycle was converted to CANCEL).

ActiveX control registration

New facilities are provided to enable the developer to check that any required ActiveX controls are present on the client user PC. By default, every function will check that any required controls are registered and if not will trigger the rollback function. If required, this behaviour can be disabled, and the developer can perform their own checks (e.g. checking all controls are present at application start-up) using a new logic command.

Folder file type

A new folder file type has been introduced in PROIV Version 6 which allows folders or directories on the PROIV server to be accessed from within a PROIV function. The developer can see the attributes of a file as supplied by the host operating system.

Source code documentation

A new source code documentation option allows developers to document individual source code objects (e.g. functions, files, global logics, tasks) or lists of objects. The documentation is output as XML (with rendition to HTML and PDF options via XSL / FOP).

Help Facilities

The PROIV documentation set is being re-written for Version 6, and will be provided as a complete on-line help guide. It will cover all of the PROIV Version 6 components and be broken down into Concepts, Developer and Administrator sections. Standard index & search facilities will be provided, and the documentation will also be available as pdf files and web help.

Web Development

Included with PROIV Version 6 is PROIV Web Developer, a JavaScript and mark-up language editor & debugger that parses and highlights your code as you develop. It comes with an integrated browser so you can preview your work, be it server-side JavaScript, client-side JavaScript, HTML, XML, XHTML or text files. PROIV Web Developer may also be used in conjunction with other web page editors & layout tools.

Compatibility

To upgrade to Version 6, source code is exported from VIP in PROIV Version 5.5 & then imported into PROIV Developer in PROIV Version 6. Source code from older development environments will need to be upgraded to PROIV Version 5.5 VIP first, and then exported as above. For assistance with migrations, please contact your PROIV account manager.

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