AFS Report Subsystem© - Uniface/Crystal Reports development subsystem provide rapid report development framework of templates using a data-driven report meta-data file that reduces report development costs without compromising report features. Report tab selections provide a variety of optional selection criteria controls to meet complex report design specifications. The ARS© mechanism accomplishes this by supplying UNIFACE and Crystal Report templates that accelerates development and populates a report meta-data model with selection options, C-Wrapper and COM Translators to support communication to/from Crystal enabling reuse of existing UNIFACE services for report calculations and data displays.
Presentations & Sample Report Screen Cams:
- ARS© Tour Presentation
- ARS© Presentation (.ppt)
- ARS© COM Call-in Presentation (.ppt)
- ARS© Sample Report (.scm with dialog captions)
- ARS© Sample Report (.scm no captions)
- You may need/download the screen cam player (.zip) for sample reports
UNIFACE development tab page(s) templates provide rapid UNIFACE tab page development and consistent maintenance with data input/output management for 1-to-1 and 1-to-Many tab pages.
AFS Tab Templates provide concurrency, multiple non-modal form communication, timing, synchronization and maintaining entity relationships between the main form and the tab pages. Our successful solution is comprised of three separate templates: a main form, a tab page which maintains a one-to-one relationship with the main form entity (to allow visually esthetic display of large entities), and a tab page maintaining a one-to-many relationship with the main form entity.
Presentation & Diagram:
Many Uniface applications require time consuming, database intensive updates which need to report progress in a graphical manner. The AFS Progress Bar solution combines all of these technical points into a development suite, which includes a progress bar form and a service template. The progress bar is implemented using an OCX container which supplies the familiar graphical bar indicator to the user. The service provides ongoing record metrics tallied to calculate progress percentages.
This package has significantly decreased the development time of batch updates and processor-intensive services answering the following implementation considerations:
- Performance - deployment on client or Application Server.
- Communication - control communication between an active asynchronous service and the progress bar application.
- Control - provide the ability to cancel processing in a single threaded environment.
Diagram:
The AFS Basis System provides all of the features of Uniface Building Blocks without the high level of complexity and abstraction. AFS decided against using Uniface building blocks (7.2) and developed their own AFS Basis System (adding their own utilities to the Uniface menu) to simplify development and provide a series of templates, coding standards and utilities.
The data dictionary provides a project team with the usual entity/field definitions, valid entries and other reference information. It also supports the data design process from data analysis to the developer's Uniface model managed by entity/field status indicators. And, since the data dictionary is at the heart of the application it also holds both deployment and user-driven entity/field audit flags to assist in data integrity and analysis at run time.
Another valuable utility of the AFS Basis System is the "generic fast form". This provides data review with add/edit capabilities for any entity (including traversing links to other relative entity records), making it easier to confirm accurate data conversions and setup specific business record test scenarios.
A number of the features in the AFS Basis System require certain particulars (using panels for toolbars, tech keys in each table, dynamic model level code inheritance, etc.) that support coding standards that may make it a challenge to implement into an ongoing development project that is resistant to change. However, the AFS Basis System and Utilities are ideal for "jump starting" a new project development effort (or for teams wishing to upgrade and utilize Uniface Seven capabilities) in providing a solid development foundation of templates and coding standards that have been tested and implemented at AFS.
Sample Screens:
AFS
Global Editing Message System© 
GEMS© enables users to rapidly modify or translate UNIFACE messages that reside in the UNIFACE Meta Dictionary table USOURCE. The GEMS advantage is that the user does not have to be trained as a UNIFACE developer nor do they have to use the UNIFACE Development Environment.
With GEMS the user has the option of modifying or translating messages with a very user-friendly GUI front-end application. Users can easily retrieve a message based upon library, message name, and language and they can use the Search and Select component feature to quickly find and retrieve messages (in case the user forgets the complete message name). Once the message is retrieved the user may either choose to modify the base language message or translate the message to another language.
GEMS is typically used to translate Uniface messages for:
- User customized screen field labels
- Multi-lingual translation
- Help messages
- Hints
- Error messages
- Tool Tips
GEMS© Screen and Video: