ClarionLive show notes for May 18 2012

C8 update

Mike Hanson wasn't present to give a C8 update, so Mr. No Name stepped in from his villa in France. There were many problems initially, but the latest builds are looking really solid. Mike did end up making changes to his resize templates to handle the new event processing (fewer events are now triggered). You can now have colored checkboxes and radio buttons, and the window flickering is gone. 

Where previously you could issue window changes after you open the window but before the accept loop; now you have to be sure to issue the window-related code from inside the accept loop (perhaps on an OpenWindow event?). 

Thin@ announcement

Daniel Pavlic confirms that the C8 builds he has been testing are now very solid and fast. 

Thin@ 2.1 is ready for release and will work with the C8 client (up until now Thin@ users had to stick with C7.2). The server apps can also run as a service. 

Webinar on June 8!

Word of the day: Name and PROP:Name

Greg Bailey pointed out that PROP:Name can take an additional parameter that lets you retrieve name attributes from structures. You can also use PROP:Name on files instead of specifying a variable for the file's Name attribute. 

WebGem of the day

John pointed out http://www.identitygenerator.com/, a site that will create test data for you. It exports to a variety of file types and does country-specific data. Supported SQL databases only include MySQL and Oracle, but you can probably get the data into other databases with a bit of modding. 

Coming up 

May 25 - Port your application to SQL

June 1 - SQL Import/Export

June 8 - RIS/Thin@ and Arnold's app.

Survey!

Still lots of support for ClarionLive!

DevCon question - wherever seems to be fine, Las Vegas or Orlando. 

As to when, support for one on the fall didn't seem that strong, so late spring seems more likely. 

Feature preso - John Hickey and the Ultimate SQL Class Next Generation!

I had some trouble getting the latest version to compile, and then after I got that sorted out I couldn't get connected to my local database. Eventually I gave up and started paying attention to the presentation, by which time John was demonstrating extended properties, which is a way of documenting your table directly on the SQL server. 

He also showed a ScriptToClarion converter to change an SQL script to a valid Clarion string. 

John's class now uses Rick Martin's class for retrieving data directly via the ODBC API, which is much faster than using a dummy table. 

I'm not doing any justice at all to what John has pulled together here, with his own code, Rick's code, and Gordon Holfelder's contributions. John Dunn also has contributed some code that I don't think is in the class yet.