Cleve Haynes

A hugely important question: how many spaces do you use in logic for indentation?

ProIV have been saying for a long time that they were going to release the bootstrap file definitions (ie without signing a NDA).

I didn't actually think they would do it though...

The version 6 bootstraps for VIP & Native are now available for download in the partner area on ProIV's website.

And not only are the bootstraps available, but they also come with documentation!

What the hell's going on?

Who's going to win the Cricket World Cup?

Hi

Just thought I'd share this... Although someone must have come across this before...

It seems like named pipes will work in ProIV. Makes sense really, since a named pipe will appear like any other file and are opened & read using the same UNIX system calls that are used for normal files.

I ran some tests and I can read a named pipe in ProIV using a SEQ file definition in look mode, and write to a named pipe by using add mode.

eg:
create a named pipe:
mkfifo test
echo hello > test

Run a ProIV function that reads the file "test" & UMSGs the field.  "hello" is then UMSG'd.

And the other way around:

cat < test

Run a ProIV function that writes to file "test".

This may have been useful for interfaces had I know about it before...

I don't know how dodgy it is, but could come in handy for somene.

Cleve

Since the previous poll on ALIAS had too few responses to choose from and was a somewhat loaded question, I have created another one.

Remember - ProIV only supports ALIAS in logic in and according to their definition in the manual should not even be used in global functions...

The ALIAS command is severely limited according to the ProIV documentation. It is stated in the manual that:

"This command can only be used in the Logic In of the first function in a transaction. It is not possible to re-ALIAS during the execution of a function or when a file or RDBMS table is open. Trying to do so will lead to undesirable and undefined results."

This means you cannot even use ALIAS in a global function!

Apparently, prior to version 2.x it was possible to alias in any default logic & do re-ALIASing which means some applications are still using ALIAS in an unsupported way.

Additionally, many developers have been ignoring or are unaware of the severe limitiations of the ALIAS command resulting in even more unsupported code.

This has lead to a situation where many applications around the world are now relying using the ALIAS command in an unsupported way.

The "undesirable and undefined results" are definitely true - in fact it looks like ProIV are sometimes overwriting the memory area that holds the file name.

Each new version of ProIV seems to give new & worse "undesirable and undefined results", resulting in dodgy workarounds such as this little ripper:

ALIAS("CONT.PRD","")
ALIAS("CONT.PRD",$$CONT.FILE)

That's right, in order to "reALIAS", a dodgy workaround is to set the ALIAS to blank first! This sometimes breaks in new versions of ProIV, so we have also had this corker:

ALIAS("CONT.PRD",$$CONT.FILE)
ALIAS("CONT.PRD",$$CONT.FILE)

Yep, setting it twice is another dodgy workaround, depending on ProIV versions and your function.

Anyway, this poll is to ask if ProIV should fix the ALIAS command to allow re-ALIASing and to be used in any default logic.

Cleve