Tony White

Its been a while, but I beleive at one site we had to completely rewrite our user interface because all of the users suddenly discovered they could d...

Hi Rob

Interesting - I guess that being relative new-comers to VIP, Sertec may have missed out on some early problems, and so we can only comment on recent versions, which have certainly treated our apps well-enough.

We've now got a VIP-built 4000 function app, multiplied across 8 company boot-sets and not (touch wood) had any corruption. VIP has been a little tempremental from time to time - but nothing too serious, and all of the bugs have been fixed fairly quickly - to the extent that we have no current outstanding issues with Pro-iv at the moment.

By the way - earlier in the thread someone mentioned how slow it is to alter the same flag on many fields. A handy trick is to use Forms Designer - By marqueeing all of the fields that you wish to change you can alter the properties box just the once.

Yes I did say Forms Designer ! - But amazingly this now works too. In the old days we used to steer well clear on the assumption that it could break a function quicker than Saddam could re-locate a weapons cache (got 1 in again!) but it really has been made to work hand in hand with VIP now - and we use it as standard without problems.

Rgds
Tony White

For us the proof has been in the pudding.....

We've had 3 developers here at Sertec cutting apps full-time in VIP, on a AIX kernel (204) since last October. The apps have all deployed live without problem, and certainly taken less time to develop than would have been the case with Studio/Native.

Whilst there are a few tasks that take slightly longer in VIP, these pale into insignificance when you consider all the plusses...

Linkage, worklists, Object cut and paste, Fragments etc...
all stuff we'd hate to lose if we had to go back to Studio. Just being able to chuck stuff from one function to another across a common clipboard is fantastic - Makes the old Studio LS Copier look like a scud missile (That's my attempt to keep this thread relevant).

Its true that VIP has had some minor bugs - but in fairness Pro-iv have fixed them as fast as we've reported them. We're now on VIP 5.587, and although I can only speak for our AIX platform it does seem pretty robust.

And finally - No! I'm not in the pay of Neil and the boys down in Hemmel! In the past I'd have been the first to agree that their products have lacked decent SQA - but as far as VIP's concerned - its a thumbs-up from Sertec.

I've used lock logic in version 4 on AIX OK.

Usually in updates running under cron, where I want to just ignore the transaction if a record happens to be locked.

I usually use something like

IF @RETRYCOUNT = 10
SUPPRESS_RETRY()
ENDIF

Not sure why your UMSG isn't working - but you could try this and see if the lock releases after (say) 10 retries.

'Function Divergence' between Sertec's various companies is quite an issue with us, so we spent quite some time trying to find a way of quickly comparing two functions.

Like you we could find no obvious answer, and in the end we had to write some functions that compare the bootstraps themselves.

Unfortunately, comparing all of the detail would have been a huge task, so as a rough guide to whether funtions are different, our 'Divergence Checker' simply counts the number of LS, the number of Logics and the number of fields in each function. The logic lines are also compared on a one for one.

Over the years our developers have found this to be a pretty useful 'Rough Guide'.