Hi Brian,
These are wonderful changes! Please pass along my thanks to Lew.
When Lew made 2.6x, he asked me what HTML tags to use for ;;W and did as
I recommended, so I have to take full responsibility for it not being
standards-compliant. One of the mistakes that I made was to have
underline codes use the italic HTML tags. It would be best to use the
underline XHTML tags instead, as you have suggested. I know of no good
reason to use italics.
Adding mass deletion would be useful to me.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Bruce
Brian Hancock wrote:
Hi everyone,
Lew has been working on a new version of DP with some improvements for
scripting, and I have had the pleasure of doing some preliminary
testing. Lew doesn't have easy access to the group mailing list and has
asked me to ask a few questions.
The major thrust of the new DOS based version 2.6Y is to
support scripting a little better, this allows it to perform better in
web based applications, and also desktop application which are driven by
scripts.
The major change is that by default if you use the /EI switch to import
data from a transaction logs, then reports will output to STDOUT
(often referred to as printing to the console). For example if you run
the DOS DIR command at a DOS screen the output streams onto the console
screen, and after DIR has finished you can still read the output on the
console. In contrast a DP report printing to the screen only displays
while DP is executing, and is removed from the screen after you exit the
report and before DP exits. There are a couple of advantages to being
able to output to STDOUT (or the console). Firstly at present to use
output from DP in another program you first have to save it to a file in
DP, and then open the file with another program to use the data. It is
currently not possible to pipe data from one application into another.
Many DOS users would be used to piping the output from DIR to the MORE
command so you can view the output a page at a time. There are many
advanced text processing tools which could be used with DP more quickly
and efficiently, such as AWK amd SED, etc. The new version allows
piping to secondary processes.
A major advantage of using STDOUT for output from DP is that data can be
sent directly to a web browser or other internet application. At present
you need to save the output from DP into a file, and then with another
program read the file and output it to the web browser. This has two
problems, firstly, there are more steps to getting data to the browser
and so is slower, and secondly, until a report finishes and DP exits
nothing can be sent to the browser, so there is often a long period of
inactivty until the web browser's screen suddenly fills with data.
(users often think a problem has occurred with this delay). Using
STDOUT, output from DP reaches the web browser screen as it is output
from DP, so even a long slow DP report can present results to the user
while it is still running.
So that is the background to the new version. Some of the changes are:
- the ;;W field output formatter will act on normal text fields and not
just multiline alphanumeric memo type fields
- from a /EI transaction log you can select for more that one report to
run, this is a bug fix from 2.6x. This has great benefits in that you
can compartmentalise reports. For example, you can have a simple report
to add data, another to delete data, and another to edit data, but only
need one report to view the output, With the current 2.6x version you
must either combine sections of the report the output into each of those
operations, or execute DP twice. Now you could specify the two reports
as in #R:=3= #R:=10= to run report number 3 and when that is finished
run report number 10.
- the ;;W acts on all of the XML/XHTML predefined entities,& & "
" ' ' < < > >
- the ;;W transforms a single line break (carriage return) in a AxAy
memo type field to a <br /> instead of <BR> to conform more with XML and
XHTML standards.
- the ;;W transforms two consecutive line breaks in an AxAy memo field
to two line breaks <br /><br /> instead of a single <p>. This also makes
it more conforming to XML and XHTML standards.
- the ;;W transforms bold markup in an AxAy field to <b>...</b> in place
of <B>...</B> to make it conform to standards.
- The Beep function is to be removed
This leads to the questions, currently the ;;W output for an underlined
text in an AxAy field output as <I>....</I> which with HTML indicate
italics rather than underline. Lew believes there was a deliberate
reason for this rather than just an oversight, as you would normally
expect the output to be <u>....</u>. Lew wants to know if this would
cause a problem to anyone before he changes it.
The other question Lew has, in that with scripting using the /EI
transaction log there is no simple way to delete all records from a
panel or to empty the database. You can do these with reports, but in
comparison to the inbuit function to do this, reports are very slow. Lew
would like to add two new functions to the transactions logs. #DA =x= to
delete all the records in Panel numbered x, or #DT: , but before he does
this he would like to see if people would find it worthwhile.
Lew is getting very close to having a candidate for release, but if
there are any other bug bears, now would be a good time to air them and
I will pass them on to Lew.
Lew is also working on a Windows version of DP, but it is early days yet.
Regards
Brian
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