Vulcan Help Anyone?

[SteveMcNaughton]

I know it's not the right place, but I know some Vulcan folks are among the VO users here. I'm looking at vulcan and currently using VO 2.8.I'm at the bottom of the Vulcan mountain looking up, so pardon the questions.

1. just trying some simple demo programs, I tried opening some of my production databases which do NOT use DBF as the extension. They fail saying it's not a DBF database. If I simply change the extension to DBF, they open. I have set the RddSetDefault('DBFCDX') as I use that in VO. Any ideas?
2. I use some third party libs and wonder if anyone has used them or replaced them successfully in Vulcan.

- RIGHTSLE**
- BBROWSER**
- FABZIP
- FABTWAIN
- R&R Report writer
- Saxcomm (modem/scripting library)(this may not be needed).

For consistency, the 2 ** items I'd like to use going forward and the others I would need only if I were to port my current app to Vulcan. Currently, I want and need to use Vulcan to read/write the files on my current app which directly store arrays in the memo fields using VO.

Thanks for any comments you can provide.

Steve.

ps. Bummer about Steve Quinn. He helped me several times over a decade ago when I was cutting my teeth on VO. Quite a gentleman. He will be sorely missed not just by close loved ones, but the entire community too.

[Fabrice Foray]

Hi Steve,


I sure will say to move to Vulcan...and some here won't share my opinion...but that not the question.. ;) !

So, about libs that starts with FAB :
most of FabZip has been moved to Vulcan, but I suggest you take a look at DotNetZip...as my move to Vulcan was build around that library, which is far more powerfull.

I haven't moved FabTwain, but lat year at VODC conference, I had a session about using WIA from Vulcan...and some source/sample, it's maybe time for a publication at my website.

Regards,
Fabrice

[Willie Moore]

Steve,

I have not used DBFs in a number of years so I cannot help you with that
part. rightSLE for Vulcan (VO classes) is available. Send me an email and I
will reply with the current version. There are some minor changes that you
will have to make but nothing that should give you a lot of grief. I also
have a version of rightSLE for Winforms and WPF.

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP

"SteveMcNaughton" wrote in message
news:48d3e95d-90f8-4d1f...@googlegroups.com...

[Willie Moore]

Steve,

I will write a small sample for the DBF open and get it submitted to
development.

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP

"SteveMcNaughton" wrote in message
news:48d3e95d-90f8-4d1f...@googlegroups.com...

[Willie Moore]

Steve,

Here is a small example to try. When you build it, make sure that you add
the VucanVOGUI, VulcanVORDD,VulcanVOSystem, and VulcanVOWin32APILibrary
references.

I took the customer.dbf from the vo28\samples\gstutor folder and made 3
copies. The first I left as customer.dbf. The second I renamed to
customer.aaa and the 3rd was renamed to customer (no extension). All worked
in my test. Please let me know if it works on your system.

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP

[STAThreadAttribute];
FUNCTION Start( ) AS INT

LOCAL nExitCode AS INT
LOCAL oDB AS DbServer

RDDSetDefault( "DBFCDX" )

TRY

// add code here
//
oDB := DbServer{"Customer.aaa"}
? oDB:RecCount
oDB:Close()
oDB := DBServer{"Customer"}
? oDB:RecCount
oDB:Close()
oDB := DBServer{"Customer.dbf"}
? oDB:RecCount
oDB:Close()
wait


nExitCode := 0

CATCH e AS Exception

ErrorDialog( e )
nExitCode := 1

END TRY

RETURN nExitCode

[Joachim Bieler]

Hello Steve,

bBrowser.NET (Vulcan Edition) is available for Vulcan.NET:

http://www.bbrowser.com/english/shop/onlineorder.htm#bBrwNet1VN2

This version is compatible with bBrowser 3 for Visual Objects. I work at bBrowser.NET 4 (Vulcan
Edition) currently, which will be compatible with bBrowser 4 for Visual Objects. I plan to publish
this version in 4-5 weeks.

Regards,
Joachim Bieler

[Willie Moore]

Steve,

If you really want to get a good jump start on Vulcan, there is a conference
in Cologne Germany in March called Vulcan Live. There have a full day before
the main show starts just on getting started with Vulcan. Dieter and
Meinhard will be teaching that day. Both are really good instructors! I
will not be there this year. I am having a small procedure done on my back
on March 6th but I can highly recommend the conference. I have been to
several in Germany and they are always well run.

http://www.visualobjects.de/konferenz.html

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP

"SteveMcNaughton" wrote in message
news:48d3e95d-90f8-4d1f...@googlegroups.com...

[SteveMcNaughton]

Willie, thanks for the reply. I tried to compile this and I'm head slamming.

You wrote.

> Here is a small example to try. When you build it, make sure that you add
> the VucanVOGUI, VulcanVORDD,VulcanVOSystem, and VulcanVOWin32APILibrary
> references.

I created an empty VO console app.
I copied your code in.

I tried to add #using + any of your referenced and get:

Error 1 unknown namespace 'VulcanVORDDclasses' (are you missing an assembly reference?) c:\Users\Steve\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\ConsoleApplication1\ConsoleApplication1\Start.prg 6 9 ConsoleApplication1

I tried this
#include "VOGUIClasses.vh"
#include "VORDDClasses.vh"
#include "VOSystemLibrary.vh"

and get this...
error VN4011: 'DbServer' : unknown type (are you missing an assembly reference?)

obviously, missing basic knowledge... what am I missing?


FWIW, When I had my issues, I was opening the files up in an MDI databrowser.

[Willie Moore]

Steve,

You need to go to the references in VS or VIDE and add in the VulcanVORDD.
For VS, you right click over references in the solution explorer and select
add reference. The chose the dotNet tab and finally scroll down till you get
the the Vulcan references.

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP

"SteveMcNaughton" wrote in message

news:4795e514-15ec-4c3d...@googlegroups.com...

[SteveMcNaughton]

Thanks for your reply Fabrice. I'm not transporting my main app yet, so I have a little time for your TWAIN driver. I'm trying to figure out what my glide path will be in the future to keep the surprises to a minimum. I'm looking to Vulcan to write a new app that needs to be able to read/write my existing files and can export XML in a certain format.

[SteveMcNaughton]

Thanks Joachim,

In general, Are the calls backwardly compatible with previous BB versions?

I just went back to figure out what version I have and it's BB for VoO2.8, v1.5!

thanks.

[SteveMcNaughton]

BINGO!

1 notch higher on learning curve.

Thanks.

[Johan Nel]

Hi Steve,

Just my 2c worth of adding to what others have already said, pop in on the
Grafx news servers, news.cavo.com there are many of us old Clipper heads and
VO guys helping. Look also at the grafx.public.vulcan.pearls NG for lots of
examples.

HTH,

Johan Nel
Vulcan VIP
Durban, South Africa.

"SteveMcNaughton" <stevemc...@auditron.com> wrote in message
news:48d3e95d-90f8-4d1f...@googlegroups.com...

[SteveMcNaughton]

DBF "problem" error resolved.

It was an "IBM" error... (Idiot Behind Machine).

I thought the error was coming from a run-time lib in Vulcan, but found this code in the standard shell of the example...

IF (Len(cFileName) > 3 ) .AND. (Upper(Right(cFileName, 4)) == ".DBF") <<<<<DUH!

Thanks for everyone's help. Especially Willie, your example proved the problem!

Back to studying sample code...

Steve.

[Er!k \/!$$Er]

Steve,

One of the reasons I did not took the Vulcan-root was the lack of
compatibility.
Your Vulcan code may look like VO but getting a larger VO-project to work in
Vulcan is not a simple task.
Look at your question. All the 3th-party libs you name, are written in VO.
So if Vulcan would be VO-compatible, why cannot you just transport the code
and recompile it with Vulcan? So moving towards Vulcan also means buying new
version of the 3pp's And for the money that costs, you can also buy much
more powerful .NET libraries.
Not a single bad word about bBrowser, it was the ultimo grid for VO, but it
is a fraction what like Infragistics offers. The same goes for reporting
tools.
Where I always thought C# would be too hard to learn I now know it is not.
And with 100,000’s other .NET developers, you’ll find almost a solution on
the internet for any problem you’ll face
And do not make me talk about the guy who brings Vulcan to market.

regards,

Erik


"SteveMcNaughton" schreef in bericht
news:48d3e95d-90f8-4d1f...@googlegroups.com...

[Joachim Bieler]

Steve,

backward compatibility is always very important for bBrowser. Of course there always are
new features at new versions, too. HTML clipboard You can check whether the new features concern
you. Please have a look in the update documentation for bBrowser 2 and 3:

http://www.bbrowser.de/english/bbrowser/help/update_version_2.htm
http://www.bbrowser.de/english/bbrowser/help/update_version_3.htm

Regards,
Joachim Bieler

HTML clipboard

[D.J.W. van Kooten]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:01:16 -0800 (PST), SteveMcNaughton
<stevemc...@auditron.com> wrote:

Hello Steve,

>
>1 notch higher on learning curve.
>

Congratulations. We've just released a small Vulcan applications, the
IC2 Teletekst Browser after some Transporter and other tests. First a
bit about this app.

As in many countries, TV's have Teletext, (Ceefax in GB). Much of the
news I got via a small PC browser retrieving these pages, but after a
lay-out of the broadcasting company, this browser didn't work anymore.
I got the idea to make a nice WPF Vulcan alternative for this browser.
Although the program is in Dutch you may want to download and run it
and it you will probably understand most of
it. Just type a 3 digit valid page number, a shortcut to see pages.
You can find it on tt.ic2.com. It's a small appliactions but contains
a lot of techniques which I expect to need the next few years.

You can also use the Grafx newsgroup where they have a public and
private (VPS) section for Vulcan, Visual Studio etc.

In general I recommend to use the Transporter for business logic only
and rewrite your application using WPF (forms with XAML code) or the
more mature Winforms, and end up without the layer around your code
which allows Vulcan to keep VO code running. You will benefit from
much more options to make your own lay-out as the Teletekst browser
proves. Not everything is better in .Net. I am still trying to get a
.gif file from HTML and save it working, which is 2 lines of code in
VO. On the other hand, there are plenty of samples. I usually try a
couple in C# (usually the first 5 don't work <g>) and then use
Reflector to translate it to Vulcan code. Except for the 2 seconds
delay every .Net program has on starting, to start the IM interpreter,
most Vulcan programs run faster.

The biggest drawback of .Net (any language) is that editing code is a
nightmare compared to VO. In VO, you can edit one or any combination
of entities in any order and sort these on last edited. In VS, you
download a full .cs or .prg (etc) program containing all the entities
in order your input. I still have to decide if I should take this for
granted and do more and more in Vulcan.


I assume you're from the USA.If you would have time to come to the UK
in October, there's the Devcon. I visited it last year and this really
was a boost to my knowledge about .Net. Apart from travel costs for
those far from Shrewton, the conference fee is ridiculously low, with
all day great catering too.

I'll try to reply on your questions here or in the Grafx NG.

For this one: you can open a dbf with any extention. I just tried it
from my transporterd database viewer after changing a check and
renaming a .dbf to .tst:

IF oFileSpec:Extension == ".DBF" .OR. oFileSpec:Extension == ".ADF"
.OR. oFileSpec:Extension == ".TST"

oNewChild:= General_Viewer{SELF, cFileName, lReadOnly,, lShared}

The cunstructor (=init) of this class contains the code:

cDriver := "DBFCDX"
ofileSpec := FileSpec{ sFileName }

sfilenameNoEx := ofileSPec:FileName

And that works
Dick

[D.J.W. van Kooten]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:45:24 +0100, "Er!k \\/!$$Er"
<nos...@nospam.url> wrote:

>One of the reasons I did not took the Vulcan-root was the lack of
>compatibility.
>Your Vulcan code may look like VO but getting a larger VO-project to work in
>Vulcan is not a simple task.

It's actually quite simple but a I wrote in another reply here, I
agree with Erik that some major rewriting will do the job. Then VO
experience and transported code will help you to much quicker program
your business logic in Vulcan.

>Not a single bad word about bBrowser, it was the ultimo grid for VO, but it
>is a fraction what like Infragistics offers. The same goes for reporting
>tools.

NetAdvantage Reporting 2012 Vol. 2 w/Priority Support
Details $1,495.00

bBrowser.NET (Vulcan Edition) for Vulcan 2.0
199.00 �

To just name one difference. Lots of .Net "official" solutions are
much more expensive than VO/Vulcan, even with VPS (compared to MSDN).
Joachim is working on a WPF bBrowser I understood. That will be my
choice if it is released.

>Where I always thought C# would be too hard to learn I now know it is not.
>And with 100,000�s other .NET developers, you�ll find almost a solution on
>the internet for any problem you�ll face

That's true too, and I found the same as Erik. Still I find C# with
the stuipd {}'s feels a lot less comfortable to program than
VO/Vulcan. I already dislike the fact that I can not mark my code with
method x class y, because you have to make sure your code is contained
within the class definition of "y".

Dick

[Willie Moore]

Erik,

Having written one of the 3rd party tools, I can say that rightSLE for the
VulcanVO classes was a transport and change about a dozen lines. Most of the
changes I made were a result of using some "undocumented" features in VO
that were not available in Vulcan. But I knew when I chose to use
"undocumented" features that they might be removed. That is also why you
cannot use the 2.7 version of rightSLE with 2.8.

The winforms and wpf versions of rightSLE were not transported but designed
to use the regular dotNet classes.

I also use c# and vb.net (depends on what the client needs). Each has their
strong points and each has their quirks. I have purchased a lot of the
Vulcan libraries plus the Infragistics NetAdvantage. I purchased the
Infragistics code for a project where the client wanted the same look and
feel between the desktop app and the web app. The client was very happy with
the outcome. bBrowser, rightSLE, ReportPro 2 & 3, GridPro all work well in
Vulcan.

Regards,
Willie
Vulcan VIP