Creating a new CDC policy using the Database Administration Console When you start Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge for the first time, you need to specify a workspace location. A workspace is a folder in your file system where all your development project files reside. Each workspace is used by a single developer. A best practice is to physically locate your projects in the workspace folder. Here we specify the location for our new workspace. If you later want to share the projects and files in your workspace with another developer, you can export them. Once we have specified the workspace location, Developer Studio opens the Welcome page. We click Workbench to open our new workspace. The new workspace is displayed and is ready for use. The new workspace shows the OpenEdge Editor Perspective. This perspective consists of a set of views and an editor area that you ll use to work with your projects. Depending on your preferences you can customize the workspace by adding and removing views and changing the layout. The OpenEdge Editor can be customized. For example, your development team may decide to standardize on specifying ABL keywords in lower case. To customize how the OpenEdge Editor will work in our workspace we open the workspace preferences and drill down to the Progress OpenEdge Editor settings. Here we see several settings. To specify that we want to use lower case, we select the Lower radio button, and then select both Case keywords and Apply keywords casing on save. As you can see, there are a number of other settings that can be customized. For example, selecting Expand keywords can be selected to set the editor to automatically expand keywords as you type. Another useful group of settings enables syntax checking features. To do this, we choose the Build settings page for the Editor. The build settings properties control what types of files are built and what happens when they are built. Here we customize what happens when ABL code is saved. We select compile on save if required, select all of the syntax checking settings, and we increase the number of errors that will be displayed when the application compiles to 200. Another useful setting is to display line numbers. Displaying line numbers makes it easier to communicate with other developers and will also help you debug your code. For this setting, you navigate to the General > Editors preferences, then select Text Editors, and check Show line numbers. We save the workspace preferences by clicking OK. Next, let s see how easy it is to import a project into a workspace.
You typically do this when another developer has exported and provided you with a project. To import a project, you select Import from the File menu, and then navigate to General and select Existing Projects into Workspace. (Select Next.) [Import file is CustomerAppProject.zip] In this example, we re importing an archive file. (Select archive file selected) The best way to export and import a project is to use a zip file. To import, choose Select archive file and then browse to locate the zip file. We select the CustomerApp project archive file that we want to import into our workspace and select Finish to perform the import. [To keep simple the OpenEdge Server perspective is not introduced here.] After we have completed the import, the new CustomerApp project appears in the Project Explorer view. It has two sub-folders bin which contains compiled code and src which contains the source code. A development team should agree upon naming conventions for these top-level folders for projects. Later as we add code to our project you may notice that nothing is displayed in the bin directory. By default, the compiled code, known as r-code, is not displayed in Project Explorer, since developers typically don t work with these files during development. However, as with other areas of Developer Studio you can customize which file types are displayed based on the file extension. If you want to see the compiled code in the project, you can select Customize View, and then uncheck the filter for files with an r extension. The Console view displays a message that an ABL Virtual Machine, or AVM, has started for this project. An AVM is the compile and runtime environment for ABL code. By default, every OpenEdge project in your workspace uses its own AVM. Whenever you import a project into your workspace, a best practice is to recompile your application. One way to do this is by cleaning your workspace which compiles all code in your workspace. In our case, notice that a red x appears in the src folder for the project where you can identify the file that has an error. The Problems view displays workspace messages that are grouped by errors, warnings, and information. When you hover over an error, you can see more information about the error. In addition, if you double-click the error, the file where the error occurred is opened in the Editor and the cursor is positioned to the line that has the error. Notice that a red x is displayed on the line where the error occurred. A period is missing from this ABL statement. All ABL statements must end with a period. After correcting the error, we save the source file. Based on the preference we set earlier, Developer Studio automatically compiles the code. The error markers are removed. Now, let s create an OpenEdge project from scratch. We open the Create OpenEdge Project wizard and name the project WinForms-Client. If we select Client, we see that we can create three types of desktop applications or a Web application. The client project types for GUI for.net, AppBuilder and character are customized for these types of client projects. The code that we will import is a Telerik Winforms application which does not require a customized project type. Therefore, we select General, and then take the default project type named OpenEdge Basic, which provides all the support needed for our application. In the future, if you find your project does need to support additional features this can be done by adding facets.
We select Next. We want to use src and bin for the top-level project folder names so we make the necessary changes. We select Finish to create the project. The newly-created project appears in the Project Explorer view. We see the WinForms-Client project with its toplevel folders bin and src. You can optionally create sub-folders under src to organize your application code. Here we create the GUI and Adapter folders. You do not create sub-folders under the bin folder as they are created automatically when you compile your code based on the directories in the src folder. Copying CustomerBEServiceAdapter.cls] To add existing source files to a project, you import them by dragging and dropping files from your file system, using Windows Explorer, into the appropriate project folders. Here, we add an ABL class file to the Adapter folder. A best practice is to always copy files into your projects, rather than link to them. Copying GetCustomerInfo.cls, GetCustomerInfo.resx, assemblies.xml] Next, we add an ABL Form class file along with its resources to the GUI folder and add the Telerik library assemblies to the project. Copying RunClient.p] And finally, we add an ABL procedure file to the top-level src folder. After adding these files to the WinForms-Client project, we see errors in the Problems view. The errors you see when you copy files into your projects could be related to the order in which the files were copied. A best practice is to clean your workspace each time you copy a set of files into your workspace. Now let s look at using the OpenEdge Editor. First, let s open procedure file RunClient.p. When you double-click, a file containing ABL code, it opens in a new tab in the OpenEdge Editor. The Outline view displays the Using declarations and Variables defined in the procedure file. When you click on an item in the Outline view, such as a variable, it takes you to that location in the editor. Now let s open an ABL class file, CustomerBEServiceAdapter.cls in the Editor, by double-clicking it in the Project Explorer view. The Outline view shows the Properties and Methods of the class. We now have multiple files open in our workspace. If you enable Link with Editor in Project Explorer, the file you are currently viewing in the editor is highlighted in Project Explorer so you can see its context within the folder structure of a project. You can turn this feature off by again clicking Link with Editor. Form class files, for example a class representing a Telerik WinForms UI, can be opened in either OpenEdge Editor or Visual Designer. Visual Designer is used to add controls to a form, while OpenEdge Editor is used to modify ABL code in the form. Here, we open the GetCustomerInfo.cls, a Telerik Winforms file, in the Editor. Then we open the file in Visual Designer. The same file opens in both views. [GetCustomerInfo.cls]
In the OpenEdge Editor, you can expand and hide parts of your ABL source code to make the context of your code easier to understand. Creating an ABL procedure or ABL class file is easy using the Wizards provided by Developer Studio. To create a new procedure in the Adapter folder, we right-click the folder and select New > ABL Procedure. We name the file example.p and click Finish to create the ABL procedure file, which is opened in a new tab in the Editor. [Show program - RunClient.p] The OpenEdge Editor uses colors to represent different elements of an ABL statement. [Type in - def var icustnum as int init 500 no-undo.] As we type ABL code, the editor automatically completes keywords since we configured this preference for the workspace. Here we type an ABL statement to define an integer variable. Notice that there are different colors for ABL keywords, variable names, ABL data types, as well as constants which appear in blue. [Using program RunClient.p] You may find that you want to comment or uncomment your code. You can comment any single line of code by adding two slashes to the start of the line. Commented code is displayed in green. You can comment out a section of code by selecting the code, and then selecting that you want to comment the source, by selecting Source > Toggle Comment. In this video, we ve been doing most tasks by selecting menu options. Most changes can also be done using keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can toggle between commenting and uncommenting code using Ctrl /. Notice the asterisk in the tab for RunClient.p. This indicates that the program has been modified and that the changes have not been saved. [Type in - def var ccustname as string.] If the ABL statement we type has a syntax error, we receive immediate feedback because we enabled syntax checking for the workspace. In addition, the marker bar on the right indicates each error in the file. This can be useful in larger files since the marker bar shows the relative position of each error in the file and you can go to that line in the code by selecting the marker. Saving RunClient.p, clears the asterisks and attempts to compile the code. The compile errors appear in the Problems view. After we correct the error and save the file again, errors in the Problems view are cleared. We execute the code in the current procedure file by clicking the Run icon. The form appears. When we click the button Get Customer to retrieve the customer name, a runtime error occurs. This is because the AVM for the WinForms-Client project cannot find the ServiceInterface folder, which is located in the CustomerApp project. To fix this, we must modify the project properties for the WinForms-Client project, so that the compiled code of the CustomerApp project is available to the client code. We open the Properties for the WinForms-Client project. We navigate to the Progress OpenEdge > PROPATH properties,
and add the bin folder of the CustomerApp project to the OpenEdge PROPATH for the WinForms-Client project using Add Workspace Directory. After this change is made, we can successfully run the application in Developer Studio. Clicking Get Customer now displays Center Sports. To close the OpenEdge Editor or Visual Designer view for a file, you simply close the tab. If there are modifications to a file that have not been saved, Developer Studio prompts with a message asking if the changes should be saved. This completes our introduction Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge. You ve seen how to set up an ABL development environment, import and create projects and application files, and how to use the OpenEdge Editor perspective to work with ABL application code. To learn about developing OpenEdge ABL applications, take the course, Developing a Progress OpenEdge ABL Application.