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!

Bye Bye TIREVENT

Gen GUI logic allows you to invoke an event handler via a USE of a dummy action block called TIREVENT. For example, to invoke the event handler called "CLICK_LOGIC" you could define an event called "CLICK" in the window and then invoke it as follows:

SET temp_tirevent.ief_supplied.command TO "CLICK"
USE tirevent
       WHICH IMPORTS: temp_tirevent.ief_supplied TO Work View in.ief_supplied

This use of a dummy action block TIREVENT has always seemed a bit strange and unnecessary, so for a Rapide application, you can now invoke the event via an API call:

INVOKE temp.rapide.object . postEventToSelf( "CLICK" )

However you would still need to create the event in the window design, which again seems unnecessary, so you can now also just directly post an event to invoke the event handler by its name:

INVOKE temp.rapide.object . postEventByName( "CLICK_LOGIC" )

Simples...

Auto Suggest Fields

A new feature in Rapide allows you to define an auto-suggest field.

In the example below, the entry field for a country is supported by an auto-suggest list that shows the list of countries that start with the current value of the field.

Unlike a drop-down selection which has to contain a fixed set of data and which, if triggered by a keypress event, would slow down typing in the field, the population of the auto-suggest can be handled by an asynchronous thread in the client p-step and hence the data could be retrieved from a much larger dataset (for example from a database table via a server or web service) without affecting the user's ability to continue to type in the desired value.