Rapide integration with Studio Developer

Rapide is IET's product for developing advanced, multi-platform user interfaces with CA Gen. To enable the design of user interfaces that support more advanced features than the standard Gen toolset, Rapide provides a toolset plug-in that is used to specify additional properties in the UI design, for example responsive layouts where the size & position of controls adjusts automatically to fit the device or window size.

VerifIEr integration in Studio Developer

VerifIEr is IET's quality assurance and code checking tool. The best time to detect any errors is whilst you are developing the code rather than after the fact, so it makes sense to integrate the code checking with the development tool.

genIE Integration in Studio Developer

genIE is IET's suite of developer productivity tools, comprising both a plug-in module for toolset based features and other utilities that operate on the encyclopaedia and which are accessed from Object List+ and the GuardIEn client.

With Studio Developer, the genIE functions are now directly accessed from within the action diagram editor.

Generating and Installing Operations Libraries

When considering how to implement the generation editors for Studio Developer, one of the decisions taken was to have separate editors for online, batch and window code like the legacy Gen toolset, but also to separate client and server generation into separate editors. This mean that you could have both the client and server editors open simultaneously and also specify different target properties for each, for example Windows/C for clients and MVS/COBOL for servers.

However we also had to consider how to best handle operations libraries.

Pixel Perfect Positioning

Have you ever had trouble precisely positioning UI controls using the Gen toolset Window designer? Apart from the difficulty of doing so with the mouse (which is solved in Studio Developer by allowing you to move controls one pixel at a time with the keyboard or by typing in the co-ordinates), sometimes you cannot do so.

Synchronise Data Structure

A new feature in Studio Developer is the Synchronise Data Structure function. This shows any discrepancies between the data model and the data structure.

The tool checks the following objects to ensure that they have been specialized for the selected DBMS.

Auto-including objects for generation

A feature of the code generation editors in Studio Developer  is that whilst the editor is open it will detect changes to action blocks and procedure steps and automatically flag them for generation.

You can therefore open the required editors (for example client and server) and then when you have completed your changes to the model, switch to the editor and the objects will be pre-selected for generation.

Action Diagram Keyboard Selection

Unlike the legacy toolset, the new Action Diagram provides a keyboard caret-style cursor which can be moved around the diagram character- by-character, which gives the look-and-feel of being a text editor.  While this is not actually the case underneath, it does make navigation and editing more intuitive and flexible.

Shortcuts for adding NOTE statements

In the Studio Developer action diagram editor, there are some shortcut keys that make it quicker to add a NOTE statement.

Action Diagram Syntax Changes

One of the challenges in developing the new action diagram editor to support keyboard entry was the need to ensure that each part of a statement was unambiguous and easy and quick to enter. This necessitated a few minor changes to the action diagram syntax.

How does Undo work in Studio Developer?

One of the most useful new features in Studio Developer is the undo/redo capability that is provided with the new action diagram editor, UI Designer and Screen Designer.

We are all familiar with using Undo in all sorts of programs that we use on a daily basis. The lack of an undo capability in the Gen toolset comes as a surprise to those new to the tool and is often sorely missed, especially when you accidentally delete something in an action diagram or move controls in the UI designer.

Whilst 'undo' has probably been the most requested enhancement to the Gen toolset over the past 30 years, it was not easy to implement

Modifying an entity type identifier with Studio Developer

With Studio Developer, if you modify the identifier of an entity type, you can synchronise the table’s identifying index and associated foreign keys without needing

Custom Naming for Data Structure Objects

So far the postings on new features in Studio Developer have concentrated on the action diagrammer, but there also some useful enhancements in other parts of the development tools as well.

You can specify rules for how Studio Developer allocates names to attribute DSD names

Block Line Colours

If you have a high number of nesting levels in your action diagram code and need to decide where to place an escape or next pointer, it can be difficult to choose the correct block of code for the escape / next pointer. 

Studio Developer helps by highlighting the block lines for the currently selected statement

Statement Numbers

An optional feature in the new Studio Developer action diagram editor is the ability to display statement numbers:

TODO markers

In the new Studio Developer action diagram editor, if a NOTE statement contains the keyword “TODO” then the locator bar will indicate their presence with blue marker.

Model wide search and replace

Having concluded the series of 10 cool new features in Studio Developer, I thought why stop there? There are a lot more great new features in the tool, so these posts will continue to showcase them in no particular order.

Studio Developer contains a model-wide Search and Replace tool accessed from the Model Explorer menu which allows you to