• Surround's Thanksgiving Special
• Product Tips and Techniques
       Visual LANSA Accelerator: How to add Remarks and Freeform Notes
• Les Schwab and National Housing Trust choose VL Accelerator!
• Latest Product Releases
• Development Tips and Techniques
       Visual LANSA: Using PASS(*By_Reference) to expose owned components.
• Help Surround to Help You!: Customer Case Studies
• Surround Technologies Company Information
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If you would like to try out the software before buying it, please take advantage of the 30-Day Software Trials. Go to the Surround Technologies website, http://www.surroundtech.com, for more details.

If you are currently using, or planning on using, Visual LANSA, you need to take a look at this solution. The Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator (VL Accelerator or EVLA) is a powerful system development tool that helps the development team rapidly design, implement, and maintain scalable and highly integrated systems with a consistent, standard, and feature-rich Windows User Interfaces. All with virtually no manual programming.

Here's what one VL Accelerator client had to say about this powerful tool: "I believe that we probably will realize savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in programming thanks to Surround's VL Accelerator. What we can now do in about half a day versus weeks, it's like a 25 to 1 ratio of increased productivity." (Louis Vilardo, Today's Business Computers)

Go to http://www.surroundtech.com/evla for more information!

Do you use FTP? The Envision Universal FTP (UFTP) is a file transfer automation utility. It is designed to automate the distribution and management of files by using the File Transfer Protocol, FTP, over TCP/IP and by executing dynamic, flexible, pre-defined and proven scripts.

Go to http://www.surroundtech.com/uftp for more information!

With the Envision VL Accelerator, EVLA, it is very easy to add Remarks or Freeform Notes throughout your system in less than 15 minutes and without writing a single line of code. Of course, now there is the question of how do you decide which one to use? Many systems actually use both. Freeform notes are typically used for single use purposes such as explanations or instructional comments. Remarks are typically used for chronological or date sensitive information. Remarks are basically organized, categorized, and structured freeform notes and The Remark Notes are freeform notes themselves. For more information, go to the EVLA Tour and look at the Remarks Application, Using Remarks, and Freeform notes.

Adding Remarks:

Adding Remarks to your system is very easy. It takes less than 15 minutes and requires ABSOLUTELY NO CODING. Simply perform the following steps.

Step 1: Add Remarks Application and Modules to your system.
Step 2: Add Remarks to your Detailers.
Step 3: Repeat Step 2 for each Detail you wish to provide Remarks on.

That's it!     And not one line of code was required!

More Detailed instructions on these steps can be found in the EVLA User Guide. Click here to download the latest version of the User Guide. Refer to Step 4.4 in the Developing A System section.
 

Surround Technologies welcomed Les Schwab Tire Centers as its newest member of the growing VL Accelerator community in September. Les Schwab, which has approximately 30 developers, will be using VL Accelerator for all future Visual LANSA development needs. First up…a revamp of the company’s legacy employee bonus system. Happy Coding!
 

In June, the National Housing Trust of Jamaica (NHT) decided to purchase VL Accelerator after realizing that their pending Visual LANSA project would have been extended approximately 4 months without using the VL Accelerator development system. This is a perfect example of how VL Accelerator can drastically cut project development time and expenses. NHT worked with ICS2000 Ltd, a VL Accelerator reseller and solutions partner in Kingston, Jamaica, for installation, training, and ongoing consulting services. Way to go ICS2000!
 

Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator - Version 5.4 is now available with many new features. Click here to check out what's new in the latest release.

It is often important for a component to access the properties, methods, and events of its child's child or owned component. This allows the Parent component to control, set, and handle specific features of the child's child component. For Example, Component A is a parent of component B. Component B is a parent of component C (A to B to C). Component A must be able to work with and communicate with Component C (A to C).

This can be accomplished in 3 ways:

1. Inheriting - Component B can inherit From Component C, hence inheriting all of it properties, methods, and events.
2. Defining - Define properties, methods, and events in Component B that provide access to the specific features of the component C.
3. Referencing - Define a single property in Component B that can be used to pass the reference, using the PASS(*BY_REFERENCE) to component C.

Inheriting is the best method if the the functionality that must be provided in Component B fits with in the confines of the Component C structure. However, that is often not the case and inheriting is not an option.

Defining is the obvious and most common method. However, it can take a fair amount of development work on Component B to define all the necessary properties, methods , and events to process the necessary properties, methods, and events of Component C. Ongoing maintenance can be a burden as well. If any functionality is left out or added to Component C, then changes will be required to Component B to handle it.

Referencing is the easy, fast, and most efficient method. By referencing, the entire component is exposed complete with all of its properties, methods, and events. Referencing is a common coding practice. If you have worked with Active-X controls like the MS WORD Active-X or if you dynamically create and destroy components, you have probably already used referencing. This is simply another area where it can be used further.

SB_NOTE01 and SB_NOTE02

To provide a further example, refer Components SB_NOTE01 and SB_NOTE02. These 2 components can be used to include freeform notes or comments on other components. They provide virtually the same functionality, however they do it different ways.

The MEMO_NOTE component is a Memo Box, PRIM_MEMO, class component that is defined in the SB_NOTE01 and SB_NOTE02 Components. The SB_NOTE01 and SB_NOTE02 Components are used on parent forms to display freeform notes. They both provide the same specialized methods to handle the data written to and read from the MEMO_NOTE component. Parent forms perform the File I/O and pass the information to the SB_NOTE01 and SB_NOT02 Components through those Methods.

The Parent components provide graphical interfaces to the Notes such as Toolbar buttons, and Menu bar items to Cut, Copy, and Paste notes, to turn Word Wrap on or off, to show line numbers, to save changes, etc.. Therefore, the parent component needs access to this functionality within the NOTE_MEMO component. Word Wrap and showing Line numbers are Properties. Cut, copy, and paste are methods. The changed event tells the Parent component that changes have been made and the Save button should be enabled.

The SB_NOTE01 component was written before referencing was available in Visual LANSA and so it had its own Properties, Methods, and Events to provide control to the MEMO_NOTE component. These definitions are shown in the following code segment.

The SB_NOTE02 provides a direct reference to the Memo Box component, PRIM_MEMO, through its uNotes Property. This exposes all the Properties, Methods, and Events for the PRIM_MEMO component to components that use SB_NOTE02. See the following code.

This allows the components to work as shown in this image.

To control the MEMO_NOTE Component, the parent form would have SB_NOTE01 or SB_NOTE02 defined within it.  For SB_NOTE01, control would be handled similar to the following:

For SB_NOTE02, control would be handled similar to the following:

You can see how much easier it is to pass a reference and control the Component directly. Many of the Properties, Methods, and Events that are defined in the SB_NOTE01 are no longer needed in SB_NOTE02 as they are provided directly through the uNotes property. Additionally, any new functionality that is introduced to the MEMO Box Component by LANSA will be available in the SB_NOTE02 automatically.
 

Surround Technologies is currently writing customer success stories / case studies for its clients that are using the Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator product.  Case studies help to get the word out about the product and the solution that you have created at your company, thus being a win-win for everyone. 

If you would like to have a case study written about your success with the Envision Visual LANSA Accelerator product, Envision Universal FTP product, or any other Surround Technologies product, please contact Lee Paul at Surround Technologies.
 

Established in 1997, Surround Technologies, LLC is an information technology firm dedicated to providing efficient and cost-effective solutions to the corporate community by delivering high-quality software applications and consulting services.

For further information on anything that you have read in this issue of the Surround Newsletter, contact Surround Technologies at (908) 490-1235, or research their products and services on the World Wide Web at www.surroundtech.com.

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