VIP will provide a very sophisticated search and replace engine that is still on the drawing board. It will however allow you to search for 'things' (lots of 'things') and return the results to a Work In Progress Queue that may then be processed with a change request. VIP will be able to audit changes but we will also publish hooks that will allow you to link in you own audit facilities etc.

In terms of rolling regen VIP will be capable of handling all your functions and provide a collated report of failures on completion.

'Bootstrap pointers are also stored in this file and this is what makes publishing it dangerous.'

Do you mean pointers to the genfile code or something else?

If it really is dangerous, then surely the better design would be either (i) to split into 2 files - one that we can have access to and one that we can't, or (ii) to document the definition and tell us how to set the variables?

Cheers

Dan Shannon

There are two forms of data held here

the initial property and value i.e forecolor - red etc

and the default record for the object which
could be field cycle etc.

if tools were written to access this file you would have to
handle:-

tag de-duplication for function scope
tagname validation
object reference pointer maintenance (i.e. where the object is stored within the bootstraps)
default value deletes (we don't store values that returned to null states)

Failure to perform any of the above would result in behavioural issues for the function and problems within the development environments.

Although I don't doubt any decent PROIV developer could do this is it really what is required. What sort of tools do you have in mind? Should the development environment help you here?

The VIP API will allow you to write bulk search change tools and will automatically handle the ‘leg work’ above. In addition to the API a decent search and replace engine as planned for VIP should provide most of the functionality you require.

It's the same structure and the PROIV skills required are the same, you'll just be faster and more saleable.

I gathered that from your earlier posts. I appreciate the clarification.