We are pleased to announce that we have just released CodeGen V5.1.4. The main change in this version is an alteration to the way that CodeGen maps Synergy time fields, i.e. TM4 (HHMM) and TM6 (HHMMSS) fields, to corresponding SQL data types via the <FIELD_SQLTYPE> field loop expansion token. Previously these fields would be mapped to DECIMAL(4) and DECIMAL(6) fields, resulting in time fields being exposed as simple integer values in an underlying database. With this change it is now possible to correctly export time data to relational databases.

We also made a small change to the CodeGen installation so that the changes that it makes to the system PATH environment variable occur immediately after the installation completes, meaning that it is no longer necessary to reboot the system after installing CodeGen on a system for the first time.

This version of CodeGen is built with Synergy/DE 10.3.3a and requires a minimum Synergy runtime version of 10.1.1.

Today we are announcing that we have moved the open source CodeGen project from it’s former home on CodePlex to a new home on GitHub. We made the decision to do this for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that GitHub has effectively become the de-facto standard place for hosting open source projects. Even Microsoft, who built and operate the CodePlex site using their own Team Foundation Server source control technologies seem to have lost interest in it; in the last 18 months or so they have moved pretty much all of their own considerable number of open source projects to GitHub also! GIT also has several very nice features over and above what TFS has to offer, and also has the benefit of being very considerably faster to use. Related to the move is a new version (CodeGen 5.1.1), but the only changes in the new version are related from the move from CodePlex to GitHub; there is no new functionality in the new release over the 5.1.0 version that was released a few days ago.

If you don’t already have one we encourage you to create a GitHub account and once logged in to “watch” CodeGen. If you wish to receive notifications about new CodeGen releases you can also subscribe to the CodeGen Releases Atom feed. CodeGen is still distributed under the terms of the New BSD License. For the time being we plan to leave the CodePlex environment intact, but no new changes will be checked in there and no new releases will be published there.

Here are a few useful GitHub URLs related to our new home:

Just a quick note to announce that we have today released CodeGen 5.1. This release has but one new feature, but it does allow me to solve a challenging problem that I faced while working on a customer project recently. I have dubbed this new feature conditional processing blocks. Essentially it is the ability to conditionally include (or exclude) parts of a template file based on the presence or absence of identifiers that can be declared on the command line. It allows you to achieve the same kind of results that you would when using .DEFINE, .IFDEF and .IFNDEF in DBL source code, but within template files. For example a developer could include code like this in a template file:

    open(channel=0,u:i,”<FILE_NAME>”)
    <IF DEFINED_ATTACH_IO_HOOKS>
    new <StructureName>Hooks(channel)
    </IF>

The developer would then have the ability to choose whether to include or exclude the code that assigns the I/O hooks object to the channel that was opened at the time that they generate the code. By default the I/O hooks code would not be included; if it was needed the developer would define the ATTACH_IO_HOOKS identifier as they generate the code. They would do this by using a new –define command line option:

    codegen –s EMPLOYEE –t FILE_IO_CLASS –r –define ATTACH_IO_HOOKS

This may seem like a very simple change, and it is, but my mind is now racing thinking about all of the new possibilities it opens up.