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PDF API Enhancements

By Steve Ives, Posted on March 28, 2016 at 1:38 pm

Last year I announced that we had created a new PDF API and made it available via the CodeExchange in the Synergy/DE Resource Center. Now I am pleased to announce that we have made some enhancements to the original API, namely by adding the ability to:

  • View existing PDF documents (Windows only).
  • Print existing PDF documents (Windows only).
  • Draw circles.
  • Draw pie charts.
  • Draw bar charts (with a single or multiple data series).

Here’s an example of a pie chart that was drawn with the new API:

PieChart

Here’s an example of a bar chart:

BarChart

And here’s an example of a multi-series bar chart:

MultiBarChart

It’s early days for the support of charts, and I plan to make several additional enhancements as time permits, but I wanted to make the work that has been done so far out into the wild, and hopefully get some feedback to help me decide what else needs to be done.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the PDF API then I’ll be presenting a session that will teach you all about it at our up-coming DevPartner conference in May. So if you haven’t already done so, head on over to http://conference.synergex.com to reserve your spot at the conference now.

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Updated PDF API

By Steve Ives, Posted on October 16, 2015 at 11:24 am

A few weeks ago I announced that a new API called SynPSG_PDF had been added to the code exchange. Today I am pleased to announce that the API has been updated and, in addition to Windows, is now also supported on systems running Linux (32-bit and 64-bit), OpenVMS (AXP and IA64) and Synergy .NET.

Also, as a direct result of recent customer feedback, I have added a mechanism that allows a PDF file to be easily created from an existing text file with just a few lines of code. This means that existing report programs that already produce plain text output can be easily modified to produce PDF output with a small amount of code like this:

AttachFileExampleCode

If  you would like to check out the API you can download the code from https://resourcecenter.synergex.com/devres/code-exchange-details.aspx?id=245.

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New Tools for Working with PDF Files

By Steve Ives, Posted on September 11, 2015 at 2:44 pm

For some time now the Synergy/DE Code Exchange has included an item called PDFKIT which essentially contains a set of DBL wrapper code that allows the open source Haru PDF Library to be used from DBL. The work done in PDFKIT was a great start and has been used successfully by several developers, but I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me if I were to suggest that it’s not exactly the most intuitive software to use, and it’s not exactly what you would call well documented either; just like the underlying Haru library!

So as time permitted for the last few weeks I have been working on what I hope is an improved solution. I certainly didn’t want to totally reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch, as I mentioned PDFKIT was a great start, but I did want to take a slightly different approach that I thought would be more useful to a wider number of developers, and I did want to make sure that complete documentation was included. What I came up with is called SynPSG.PDF, and it is available in Code Exchange now.

When you download and extract the zip file (SynPSG_PDF.zip) you will find that it contains these main elements:

  • pdfdbl.dbl
    • This is the DBL code that wraps the Haru PDF library and is taken directly from the latest version of PDFKIT.

    Haru PDF Library DLL’s

    • The same DLL’s that are distributed with PDFKIT. Refer to the documentation for instructions on where to place these DLL’s.
  • SynPSG.PDF.dbl
    • A source file containing the new API that I have created.
  • SynPDG.PDF.vpw
    • A Synergy/DE Workbench workspace that can be used to build the code, as well as build and run several sample programs that are also included (this is a Workbench 10.3.1 workspace and will not work with earlier versions of Workbench).
  • SynPSG.PDF.chm
    • A Windows help file containing documentation for the new API 

You don’t need to use the Workbench configuration that I have provided, if you prefer you can simply include the pdfdbl.dbl and SynPSG.PDF.dbl files into the build for your subroutine library. But remember that both of these files contain OO code, so you will need to prototype that code with DBLPROTO.

As you will see when you refer to the documentation, most things in the API revolve around a class called PdfFile. This class lets you basically do four things:

  1. Create a PDF file.
  2. Save the PDF file to disk.
  3. View the PDF file by launching it in a PDF viewer application.
  4. Print the PDF file to a printer.

I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail about creating PDF documents or using the API here because these topics are discussed in the documentation, but I will mention a couple of basic things.

PDF documents inherently use an X,Y coordinates system that is based on a unit called a device independent pixel. These pixels are square and are 1/72 of an inch in each direction. The coordinates system that is used within pages of a PDF document is rooted in the lower left corner of the page which is assigned the X,Y coordinate 0,0. The width and height of the page in pixels depends on the page type as well as the orientation. So for example a standard US Letter page in a portrait orientation is 8.5 x 11 inches, so in device independent pixels it has the dimensions 612 x 792.

With most PDF API’s you work directly with this coordinates system, and you can do so with this API also, but doing so can require a lot of complex calculations, and hence can be a slow process. But often times when we’re writing software it is convenient for us to work in simple “rows and columns” of characters, using a fixed-pitch font. The new API makes it very easy to do just that, meaning that results can be produced very quickly, and also meaning that existing report programs (that already work in terms of rows and columns) can be easily modified to produce PDF output.

Here is an example of a simple row / column based report that took only a few minutes to create:

image 

Of course there are times when you need to produce more complex output, and the new API lets you do that too. To give you an idea of what it is capable of, here’s a screen shot of a mock up of a delivery ticket document that I created while working on a recent customer project:

image

As you can see this second example is considerably more complex; it uses multiple fonts and font sizes, line drawing, box drawing, custom line and stroke colors, etc. And although not shown on these examples, there is of course support for including images also.

The new API is currently available on Windows under traditional Synergy. It should be possible to make the code portable to other platforms in the near future, and .NET compatibility is definitely in the pipeline. The software requires the latest version of Synergy which at the time of writing is V10.3.1b. You can download the code from here:

https://resourcecenter.synergex.com/devres/code-exchange-details.aspx?id=245

It is early days for this new API and I have many ideas for how it can be extended and enhanced. I am looking forward to working on it some more soon, and also to receiving any feedback or suggestions that you may have.

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New Code Exchange Items

By Steve Ives, Posted on September 23, 2014 at 7:59 pm

Just a quick post to let you know about a couple of new items that will be added to the Code Exchange in the next day or so. I’m working with one of our customers in Montreal, Canada this week. We’re in the process of moving their extensive suite of Synergy applications from a cluster of OpenVMS Integrity servers to a Windows environment. We migrated most of the code during a previous visit, and now we’re in the process of working through some of the more challenging issues such as how we replace things like background processing runs and various other things that get scheduled on OpenVMS batch queues or run as detached jobs. Most of these will ultimately be implemented as either scheduled tasks or Windows Services, so we started to develop some tools to help us achieve that, and we thought we’d share 🙂

The first is a new submission named ScheduledTask. It’s essentially a class that can be used to submit Traditional Synergy applications (dbr’s) for execution as Windows Scheduled Tasks. These tasks can be scheduled then kicked off manually as required, or scheduled to run every few minutes, hours, days, months, etc. You also get to control the user account that is used to schedule the tasks, as well as run the tasks. The zip file also contains two sample programs, one that can be run as a scheduled task, and another that creates a scheduled task to run the program.

The second submission is called Clipboard, and you can probably guess it contains a simple class that gives you the ability to programmatically interact with the Windows Clipboard; you can write code to put text onto the clipboard, or retrieve text from the clipboard. Again the submission includes a small sample program to get you up and running.

Hopefully someone else will find a use for some of this code.

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Dig into Synergy/DE 9.5 – Using CodeExchange

By William Hawkins, Posted on November 19, 2010 at 12:46 pm

Like many of you, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for the release of Synergy/DE 9.5, and the general availability of Synergy .NET. The development team has been working on this project for a few years (I’m sure it seems like longer for them). But it wasn’t until the beta release earlier this year, that it became something with which you could actually start to write code that really did something useful. Those of you who were at the SPC a few weeks ago had an opportunity to use Synergy/DE 9.5 to develop a WPF application that used Synergy for all the (non-XAML) code in Visual Studio 2010.

As part of the beta testing effort, I’ve been using and updating code that has been submitted to the CodeExchange, and I thought I’d share what I did. Hopefully you can leverage the modifications that were done to the CodeExchange items to help with a possible migration to the .NET environment.

In order to make my life easier, I created a folder C:\Development\CodeExchange and deposited all of the CodeExchange submissions that were created by Synergy PSG, into subfolders.

Phase 1 Test the code in traditional Synergy 9.5.

As I knew I’d be doing a lot of test builds, I wanted to use the project build system built into Workbench (in Synergy/DE 9.3). So I created an empty workspace, and added all the Workbench projects that were in the subfolders. For those projects that didn’t have a Workbench projects, I created one, and for the few projects that didn’t have a mainline program, I created one of those too. Most of the time spent in this phase was in setting the Workbench build environment. As you would expect, the code didn’t require much (if any) modification.

Phase 2 Test the code in Synergy .NET 9.5.

When taking the CodeExchange submissions and building them in Visual Studio, it turned out to relatively easy. In order not to “pollute” the standard CodeExchange folders with Visual Studio “stuff”, I decided to create a separate folder for Visual Studio project. This was C:\Development\CodeExchangeVS, and under this folder is a subfolder for each submission – just like the Workbench folders. Inside these subfolders are a Visual Studio solution and a Synergy project. The Synergy project contains references to the code in the Workbench folders, so that I can use the same code in both places. If you just add a source code file to a Visual Studio project, what you’re really doing is copying the file to the project folder, but all Add Reference does is point the project to the appropriate source file. Now that I have a Visual Studio project, it’s just a matter of hitting the F6 button to build my application. If only it were that simple…..

When building the CodeExchange code in Visual Studio, the code falls into a number of different categories;

1) Requires no/minimal changes

2) Uses features (functions/subroutines) that are not supported

3) Needs recoding

4) Uses features (APIs) that are not supported

Again, most of the code fell into the first category, as it had already compiled using the traditional Synergy compiler. One thing that fell into the “minimal changes” category was the introduction of a logical to point to an include folder (usually the same folder as the source). As Visual Studio was using sources from a different folder, we could no longer rely upon the include file being in the “current folder”. For the purposes of CodeExchange sources, wherever a logical is required to access an include file, the source will use INC:

Also, there was very little code that required recoding – this was almost exclusively required by the use of %DLL_CALL(), which needed to be changed to %DLL_NETCALL(). The coding change was relatively straightforward. (See example below.)

.ifdef DBLNET

begin

argArray = new object[2]

argArray[1] = (object)^addr(spec)

argArray[2] = (object)^addr(WIN32_FIND_DATA)

srch_hdl = %dll_netcall(dll, DLL_TYPE_WINAPI, ‘FindFirstFileA’, argArray)

end

.else ;DBLNET

srch_hdl = %dll_call(dll, DLL_TYPE_WINAPI, “FindFirstFileA”, ^addr(spec), ^addr(WIN32_FIND_DATA))

.endc ;DBLNET

The bulk of the changes needed were mostly to deal with unsupported or not yet implemented features. I first started this project in Feb/Mar 2010, and as time progressed, the number of issues grew significantly smaller as the Synergy development team implemented features omitted from the early betas. At the time of writing, the unsupported features that got caught by the compiler are the use of HTTP_SERVER, %SS_FATAL() and W_CAPTION(). Another problem feature is the use of UI Toolkit. While there is a version of UI Toolkit that you can use when you build using Visual Studio, it’s not a complete implementation. The UI Toolkit provided with Synergy .NET is primarily aimed at allowing UI Toolkit code to be used with xfNetLink .NET and/or .NET interop projects – which are projects that do not use UI Toolkit for the User Interface. If you actually run the application and call a UI-related Toolkit routine, a runtime error will be thrown. For all the projects that used UI Toolkit, I added a try-catch around the entire application, so that I can catch any errors thrown by UI Toolkit. From a CodeExchange perspective, use of UI Toolkit is the main item that falls into the fourth category. The RCB API is another example of an unsupported feature in Synergy .NET.

One difference between traditional Synergy and Synergy .NET, is that there is no “stop message” dialog. “Hurrah!” I hear a lot of you say. Me too. However, with the CodeExchange submissions, most of the test programs are console applications, and now that there’s no stop message, when they complete, the application goes away too. This doesn’t give you much time to read the screen. So I wrote myself a little StopMessage routine, and added it to every application that needed it. As it turns out, this change was by far the largest change that I had to do.

Along the way, we’ve also enhanced some of the submissions; for example, the StringUtil submission is now more functionally rich, and we also added some new submissions (e.g., isamBenchmarks, GetDirFiles, memProc, POP3mail and SelectExample). There is also a new submission CodeExchangeVS which contains all the submissions below, plus the Workbench workspace with all the Workbench projects and all the Visual Studio solutions.

Here are the CodeExchange submissions that are included in the CodeExchangeVS download;

addSourceControl, ASCIIEncoding, axlsort, Base64, Base64_convert, BatchFileConversion, COPY_HANDLE, creditCard, DateTime, DTKproto, dtk_i_enable_set, dtk_list_multi_select, FileLocks, FindNPchars, FixData, GetDirFiles, GetWindowSize, HTTPexample, HTTPqueryString, iConvert, IsamBenchmarks, isHoliday, ismKey, ismSts, lct_lmf, LicensingToolkitExample, ll_accept, memProc, PartialMatch, POP3mail, Registry, RemoteServer, rfa_hex, rpschk, rpssql, rpsxdl, rpsxml, SelectExample, SMTPmail, SocketExamples, StringUtil, synckodbc, SynPsg.Rps, UpsTrack, url_encode, uspsWebService, WinDir, xfnl_synergy, xfplini, xfpllog, xfspism2xml.

Also, one final change. At the request of Synergy/DE Developer Support, each submission includes all the code required to rebuild the application. Previously, some CodeExchange submissions required you to download other CodeExchange submissions.

If you’re using any of the CodeExchange items above, I would recommend that you download the updated version. Synergex PSG is constantly looking for new opportunities to enhance the CodeExchange code submissions, so if you have any suggestions for new items, please let us know.

A Synergy/DE 9.5 RC (release candidate) is available now, and the general release should be available soon.

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Now that’s what I call service!

By Richard Morris, Posted on February 23, 2010 at 6:11 pm

Web services have been around for quite a while now.  If you attended the Success Partner Conference back in 2006, in London or Boston, you’ll have completed a hands-on tutorial that walked you through the steps required to consume web services with Synergy code.

During the conference, we wrote Synergy code to consume a number of different web services, from a number of different hosting sites.  The first service we utilised returned an array of valid country names. We then used the returned information to populate a UI Toolkit combo drop-down input control to allow the user to select the required country.  Other services we used allowed us to validate address details and credit card numbers.  The final web service we worked with, that I know several customers have since made use of, gave us the ability to interface with a Simple Message Service (SMS) API and send text messages to a mobile phone number.  Not all web services are free, and if I remember correctly, I believe the cost for sending an SMS was about $0.008!

So, when I saw the request from Rodney Latham on the Synergy-l list server, requesting if anyone had code to determine if a given date was a public holiday, I thought “there must be a web service to determine that”.  After a quick search on the Internet I found one at a site called www.holidaywebservice.com. After a few minutes of navigating the site, and looking at the WSDL (Web Service Description Language), it was obvious that I could write a few lines of Synergy code to consume the web service to determine if a date was a public holiday.  Another great feature of the web service was that it was free!

I knew that Rodney’s Synergy software ran on the OpenVMS operating system, so any fancy MS Windows coding was to be avoided – it had to be pure Synergy.  As long as the machine could access the internet we could execute the web service.

I could have written a regular Synergy subroutine or function, but instead I chose to implement executing the web service within a static method, as part of a SynPSG.DateFunctions class.  By defining the method as static, you don’t need to instantiate an instance of it.  This makes the coding very simple.  Add a reference in your code, using the “import” statement, to the SynPSG namespace and you’re ready.  To determine if the date is a holiday, simply execute the static method, for example;

import SynPSG

proc

    if (SynPSG.DateFunctions.IsHoliday(20100105,

&     SynPSG.CountryCode.EnglandAndWales)

    begin

    ;;we have a holiday, let’s party!

    end

The first argument to the IsHoliday() method accepts a reversed eight digit date and the second is an enumeration which allows you to select the required country code.  The enumeration is defined within the SynPSG namespace;

public enum CountryCode

    Ireland

    EnglandAndWales

    Scotland

    UnitedStates

endenum

Simple, free and the code is available on the Synergex Code Exchange – log into the resource centre and search the Code Exchange directory for IsHoliday.

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Using Workbench to Build Applications on Remote Servers

By William Hawkins, Posted on February 18, 2010 at 4:21 pm

I recently went to a customer site, to help them integrate Workbench into their OpenVMS development environment.  As a source code editor, the “integration” is relatively simple, you just need to have NFS/CIFS/SAMBA installed, and use it to make your OpenVMS (or UNIX) drives look like they’re actually Windows drives.  However, when you want to compile or link your application, you either need to go back to your telnet window and build it there, or you can download the RemoteBuild utility from the SynergyDE CodeExchange.  There are two versions for OpenVMS out there right now, both provided by Chris Blundell from United Natural Foods Inc.

Synergex PSG decided that we wanted to provide a remote build facility that could talk to multiple environments using information from a single Workbench project.  We wanted to minimize any potential firewall issues (for companies that have internal firewalls), and we also wanted to build on the SynPSG.System classes (distributed with ChronoTrack – our SPC 2009 demonstration application) for the network communication.  For those of you unfamiliar with the SynPSG.System classes, they are a partial implementation of the Microsoft System classes written in Synergy, (so they work on all supported platforms,) but when we have Synergy for .Net available, we'll be able to use the native .NET framework System class without modifying code. (ok, we'll have to change the import statements, but that should be all.)

So PSG has posted our flavor of a remote building application into CodeExchange – it's called remoteServer.   There is a client component to install into Workbench, and a server component (written in Synergy) that runs on each development server.  If you have both SAMBA (or equivalent) and remoteServer installed and configured, you are able to compile your application on the remote system, and in the unlikely event of a compile error (I know, you never have any coding errors) you will be able to double click on the error on the output window, and go straight to that line of code in the source file on your remote server.

If you work in a multi-platform development environment, I would encourage you to go download any of the remote build offerings in CodeExchange, and start using the power of Workbench to help improve the productivity of your developers.

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Testing Times

By Richard Morris, Posted on November 30, 2009 at 11:35 pm

Today, I am a Net Ninja!  Well that’s what my freebie t-shirt, procured from TechEd, says I am :).

To be honest I’m not sure what a Net Ninja is, but my understanding of a “Ninja” is a warrior, a fighter.  Someone who battles against adversity is pursuit of perfection.  Well, I feel a little like that at the moment.  Battle scared and bruised.  Not in the physical sense you understand.  I’ve been on beta testing duties, which brings both frustration and joy in equal amounts.

We currently have two products out in beta test at the moment.  The 9.3 beta contains some really cool new features, including encryption and a new “select” class.  The data encryption allows you to store your data in your SDBMS/RMS files in a form that can’t be read, even if you unload (or for you VMS guys – edit!) your files.  You can also encrypt your data between client and server for both xfServer and xfServerPlus.  The latter two ensure that any data you are transferring between server and client is “un-sniff-able!” 

Encryption is becoming more and more important in today’s world, and the ability to simply “switch on” encryption within your client/server Synergy applications is a really powerful capability.  I was stung earlier this year by identity theft.  I’d ordered a product off a web site, secure from the outside world because I ensured it was all done over HTTPS!  Suddenly I noticed credit card transactions that I didn’t know about – first port of call, my wife!  She knew nothing of the transactions and after some investigations I figured the only way my information could have been got at was from within the company – their employees!  Version 9.3 offers you the ability to encrypt your data at field, record, routine (xfServerPlus) or file level.  It’s extremely flexible.  When 9.3 is released ChronoTrack has been updated to provide examples of using encryption, and we’ll post it onto code exchange at the same time.

The “select” class is a cool and mega efficient, especially over xfServer, way of selecting data from a file that matches your selection criteria – your where clause!  I think Tod is preparing a blog about this as we speak :).

The other area of testing I’ve been doing is with our beta version of Synergy for .NET (not sure of the official title yet :)).  It was released last month.  This is really where the pain and ecstasy belong.  It’s such a cool product.  Being able to build applications in Visual Studio and have all the code in Synergy is very reassuring.  And my testing bed?  You guessed it, ChronoTrack!  It’s taken a lot of effort (the pain) to get to a point where ChronoTrack will build and run (the ecstasy) in the .NET framework, but we got there last week!  Our development team has worked tirelessly to build a product that’s going to allow our users to take full advantage of the .NET environment.  And what, I hear you ask, are the changes to the existing Synergy Code?  Well, to be honest, if the code didn’t interact with the UI then I changed no code.  I had to comment out a few references to statements (line INIT) that are not quite supported yet, but other than that the code remains the same.  It really is an endorsement of Synergy that we can build code that could have been written twenty years ago and run it in the latest and greatest environments without change.

If you want to beta test either version 9.3 or our .NET products then please sign-up and sharpen your blade.  It can be tuff, but the rewards are worth it.  And you do get ROI – you’ll have coded all your routines to support encryption and the select class before we even release the product, meaning you will be ready to take full advantage when the product is official!

If you are interested in seeing ChronoTrack running under Synergy for .NET then please let me know.  I may even produce a video about it!

I’m not sure I have made the grade as a “Ninja”, but my testing duties are complete.  I’m out and about visiting customers in the UK and Ireland this week with Nigel David.  If we encounter anything note worthy then I’ll keep you posted.

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ChronoTrack goes virtual!

By Richard Morris, Posted on November 20, 2009 at 11:36 pm

Did you attend SPC2009?  If you did then you’ll know all about ChronoTrack.  If you didn’t, ChronoTrack is an application that the PSG team developed to showcase the latest technologies available to Synergy developers.  It’s a UI Toolkit application that’s had a face lift!  It’s a cool, slick web site, oh, and a mobile app, and did I mention the system tray monitor and dashboard?  It uses the latest OO capabilities within Synergy and enhances the user experience by hosting .NET WinForms.  It exposes Synergy data through traditional functions via xfServerPlus/xfNetLink.NET to both a Web Service and fully functional Web site.

One customer, who attended SPC2009, was so impressed with the new capabilities of Synergy that ChronoTrack demonstrated they wanted to present it to their team!  So, I set the recorder going and recorded a ten minute overview video.  And what was the customer’s response?  “Perfect, I’ll be presenting this at next week’s steering committee!”

Fancy a peek?  Take your virtual tour of the ChronoTrack Windows application at http://media.synergex.com/chronotrack/ChronoTrackInAction.html.

There’ll be more videos available soon – just working on topics.  If you have any requests, please let me know by commenting against this blog.

And remember, ChronoTrack is available on CodeExchange, so if you want to see the code-behind, log in to the Synergy resource centre, click the CodeExchange link and search for ChronoTrack.

 

 

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