Funcoder Technology Blog

A leading UK logistics software company are seeking an experienced WinDev Mobile developer to work on a Windows Mobile development project involving GPRS, GPS, TCP/IP socket level comms, signature capture and bar-code scanning. The successful individual will be working with a team of software engineers with extensive experience in the logistics industry, and for a company that has a wide and varied portfolio.

The initial contract will be for a period of 3-6 months and therefore would either suit a self-employed developer or someone seeking fixed-term employment. There is the opportunity of a permanent position.

Salary negotiable. Applicants should apply in writing to cv@logistics-software.co.uk

The Android platform is becoming a very popular choice for consumers here in the UK and its a good time for developers to start building applications for both our clients and consumers.

Just look at the popularity of the iPhone app store and Android is growing to become just as amazing.

PC Soft have seen the potential of this market and added some enhancements to WinDev Mobile to make it Android development a breeze using your current WinDev skills.

So what will the WinDev Mobile for Android platform support?

Claudia kindly sent me a list of some features that will be available to us:

“The controls will automatically have an "Android Look".

The local database of Android is SQL Lite. You will be able to link controls with the data through the 7-tab window, and use the WLanguage functions of the "H" family.

The creation of applications for Android will be based on WINDEV’s Java generation, however you will still develop as usual in WLanguage.

The layout of the screen (vertical or horizontal) will be handled using the anchoring method.

WinDev Mobile for Android will offer these controls:
- Label
- Radio button
- Button
- Looper
- Image
- Tab
- Edit control
- Check box
- List
- Combo box
- Menu.

257 WLanguage functions will be available for Android.”

This is very exciting and I can’t wait to get my hands on version 15 and start developing for the Android app store.

WinDev procedure parameters are passed by reference as a default and this is great but can also cause some strange issues in your code if you are not careful.

There are a few ways to pass an object by value and one of my favourite is using the LOCAL statement when defining your parameters.

Here’s an example:

If you don’t define anything as LOCAL then you can also tell WLanguage that you are passing by value just by adding brackets around the object you are passing:

CalculateWinnerPrizeTotals((nWinnerID), xCost)

So the example above shows how you can tell the method you are passing nWinnerID by value and not by reference.

Developing WinDev applications can be fun and challenging, but where there’s ease of use comes great responsibility.

You need to structure your code is such a way that it will be easily maintainable for yourself and other developers involved in the project.

So MVC comes to the rescue when you want to have a clean and tidy source project. But I here you say, “WinDev doesn’t have an MVC framework”. Well I am going to show you how easy it is to structure your project in such a way that will make it MVC friendly.

What are we trying to achieve here?

To often we just add H commands to our form code just because it is easy to do. But the problem is this soon makes the application messy and you will find more cases of duplicating a process that was in another form.

I am going to show you a simple example of how I structure my projects in an MVC style.

Firstly I created 2 custom folders in Classes, one for Models which will interact with the database, and the other is Controllers which is the conduit between the window form code and the model.

Models

In the screen shot above you can see I have created a UserModel. This class contains all the methods I need to access the database related to a user.

Within the model is a Structure object which represents the User table fields in the database.

So here is an example of the GetUser method in the model which returns an object of type STUser.

Now the windows code does not access the model, it’s the controller that uses the model to return the required data and other information needed by the window.

In the controller the code here calls the model and returns the data as a STUser object. Here you would code other functionality you needed to manipulate the data to show in the View (form/window).

If you are using WinDev 14 then you can use the STUser structure in a very simple way to update the form.

Firstly you would create an object used to hold the data returned from the controller.

In the example above I have created a global object which will now allow me to link the controls on the form to it, as you can see in the screen shot below.

Now I have linked the controls to the object I can get the user data in just a couple lines of code.

If you don’t have WinDev 14 then its a simple task of assigning the object field data to the controls instead, as shown in this screen shot.

So now you can see how using the MVC pattern in WinDev / WebDev can make your code clean and easy to maintain.

I’m a few days late on this so I would suspect most of you know about the latest updates which fix a number of bugs in version 12 and 14.

http://www.windev.com/ts/download/windev14/index.html

The WinDev 14 update fixes a number of bugs with the Windows Editor, Report Editor, Setup and Execution.

There was no WebDev 14 update but they did release one for version 12 which fixed bugs with the Data Model Editor, Query Editor, Page Editor, Reports and Printouts, some install site changes, programming functions, PDF formatting in Linux and a fix to the HyperFileSQL HClose method in a thread.

It’s a strange name but a great step in the direction for the community. If you have any handy API’s, libraries etc you can post them to the site so that others can make use of your fine work.

You need to create an account and then you can post a resource (blog post) to the site.

We are really starting to see some momentum now at PC Soft so I am very excited about the new site and community spirit.

http://repository.windev.com/

If you are wanting to use the TX Text control with WinDev then the great news is that PC Soft have released an interim fix. This will be in a major release but you can get the fix now by contacting PC Soft.

I have made some tests with the fix and the component is working smoothly now.

The current releases of WinDev has a bug when you want to use the TX Text ActiveX control on a WinDev form.

There is a work around by adding the following code to the initialisation method of the ActiveX component.

A fix for this will be in the next release but at leased you can easily work around the problem.

Thanks PC Soft Support for this…

If you open a window, class, etc using the Ctr-E Fast Selection window

then your window will be out of sync with the Project explorer. You don’t need to go finding the window you are working on manually, just select the synchronise element button   in project explorer.

UPDATE!!

This afternoon I received a telephone call from Claudia at PC Soft. She discussed my comments in this blog post and explained about some of the benefits we have received from a later version which included more examples translated to English.

I reiterated about the number of bugs we are getting with this new version and Claudia has asked for you to please send bug reports to PC Soft so that they can investigate them.

She also wants to hear from you if you are having any issues with PC Soft or concerns about bugs not being resolved. Please contact Claudia at claudia.rivera@pcsoft.fr and help her to understand any issues you have.

I discussed about the bugs that developers are complaining about in the latest version

I have been developing applications and websites in WinDev / WebDev for the past 2 years. So why this question now?

Well we have seen the release of Version 14 at the beginning of this month, 6 months after the French release. Come on now PC Soft, 6 months is a lifetime in the technology industry. If they were really committed to expanding then you would see the English version created in parallel to the French.

If you look at other development tools, many produce multi-lingual versions and release them at the same time.

Maybe its a problem with their codebase which makes it complicated to created multi-lingual versions, but surely they would be working towards resolving this.

The other issue is the lack of communication between the community and PC Soft. The www.windev.com website it pretty much stagnant with no focus on providing information about news, tips etc.

What about LST? Why do they not produce an English version?

Don’t get me wrong, I love programming in WinDev but I feel it is a very lonely experience. I am also finding it harder to convince clients their are other developers that can support the systems I write. I know there are some but we are talking so much less than there should be.

WinDev 14 has made me re-think about this product, not only for the 6 months wait but then the quality. Every day I come across a bug which is driving me nuts.

The new version has all these new information messages to help you build quality code, but it generates these errors even on PC Soft’s own RAD classes.

I don’t want to move back to .NET but its looking more that I will have to. It’s sad as I have already started writing a WinDev book but what should I do?

I think now it the time for the powers at PC Soft to speak up and be more open about their future plans.

We’ll there’s my rant and you are welcome to disagree. Leave a comment and maybe we can make PC Soft aware of our feelings and hope they will become more involved in the community.