Day 052 - Business rules and wild geese

Page 423 of the tutorial discusses WinDev's support for time management. WinDev stores time tracking data in a Hyperfile Classic or Client/Server database, and gives you basic tools for tracking project status and time spent on various tasks. 

I've touched on the task aspect already, and think I'll leave the time management particulars as an investigative task for the interested reader. 

I've also previously mentioned the pros and cons of having all aspects of software development managed by one vendor in one IDE. Time management seems to me to be a classic example. Are you going to find any support for contemporary practices such as Scrum or Kanban? Nope. Do you get tight integration with your IDE? Yep. 

Business rules

I spend a lot of time lately harping on the need to isolate business logic from the user interface and data storage aspects of business applications. 

When I saw that WinDev supported business rules, I thought that maybe this was a way to help accomplish that goal. And immediately prior to covering business rules, the tutorial showed how to take some embedded validation code and convert it to a procedure. 

So I thought Aha! WinDev has a way to automatically apply code throughout my app, wherever a particular condition applies. Cross-cutting concerns! Way cool!!

But no, that's not what it does at all. You define a rule, and you can mark the places where the rule applies, but this is just a text notation. You still have to implement the code yourself. 

All of this took me a while to figure out, or rather to not figure out. I finally just asked the good folks on the Skype chat. 

So I'm afraid I don't really have much to offer for today's instalment.Â