Studio Developer Cool New Feature #1 - Undo

To conclude our countdown of 10 cool new features of Studio Developer, at #1 it has to be the single most requested enhancement to CA Gen over the past 30 years - Undo (and Redo)!

When editing action diagrams, UI designs or Block Mode screens, you can

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #2 - Action Diagram Editor

At #2 of the cool new features of Studio Developer is the look and feel of the new action diagram editor. Unlike the legacy Gen toolset where you have to use mouse clicks to build up statements, the new editor allows you to type in the statements using the keyboard in an intuitive manner that is similar to most other code editing workbenches like

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #3 - Partially complete statements

One of the strengths of CA Gen is that it imposes a high degree of integrity on the models. For example, when coding an action diagram, you cannot reference an invalid data object or create an invalid statement.

In the legacy Gen toolset you must fully complete each statement before it is added to the action diagram. This can create a lack of flexibility when coding more complex logic since you may wish to partially complete a statement and then review some other part of the logic or check something elsewhere in the model before completing the statement.

The action diagram editor in Studio Developer has been designed to cater for partially complete or invalid statements, and it only requires

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #4 - Copy/Paste

Like the Gen toolset, Studio Developer allows you to copy & paste statements between different action diagrams in the same model (this is called xcopy in the toolset). In addition, unlike the toolset, Studio Developer allows you to copy statements from one model and paste them into an action diagram belonging to a different model.

When pasting statements that reference views, you can also

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #5 - Code Snippets

Code Snippets are a new concept to CA Gen. They allow you to save selected statements to a file and then insert them at a later point into another action diagram, which can also be in a different model.

They operate in a similar way to copy&paste, except that you save the copied statements to the Snippet library rather than the clipboard. The library of code snippets is built

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #6 - View Definition

One of the most frequent activities when developing in Gen is to create new views, usually via view matching or by copying existing views to a new view section.

The old Gen toolset suggests the same view name when copying views, which when you are copying an import view to an export or local view is not very useful because usually you will have view naming standards to follow.

With Studio Developer you can specify preferences that define your view naming standards. In the example below,

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #7 - Pinned Objects

How many times do you want to open a recent or commonly used object like an action diagram, procedure step or work set and have to waste time scrolling through a long list of objects to find it? Conversely, how many times do you use the ability to 'pin' frequently used documents in products like Word or Excel, or use the Recent Files options available in many tools?

If like me the answer is often, then you will enjoy the new feature in the Model Explorer to maintain a recently used objects list

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #8 - New UI Designer

Studio Developer contains all new designers for both GUI windows and block mode screens which make significant improvements to the Gen UI design capability, based on user feedback and enhancement requests provided by the Gen community.

Key features of the new UI Designer include:

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #9 - Model Explorer

At the heart of Studio Developer is the Model Explorer which provides access to objects in the model via a tree structure.

At the top-level there are entries for the most commonly used object types, for example

Studio Developer Cool New Feature #10 - Modern IDE

At number 10, we start off our series on the 10 cool new features with "Modern IDE".

More and more developers learn to code using a modern IDE and so when they start using CA Gen's current toolset, or have to switch between Gen and a modern IDE, the contrast between the user experience of the Gen toolset and the modern development tools

Studio Developer Cool New Features

With the recent announcement of the availability of the new Studio Developer from IET on 31st October, we thought we would count-down to this milestone date by previewing 10 cool new features in Studio Developer. Each day a new feature will be highlighted, so visit this blog every day until launch on the 31st of October!