Robelle | Products | Library | Support | Partners | Contact Us |


left arrow up arrow right arrow

What's Up, DOCumentation? 2001 # 5

Robelle logo

September 2001


From:

  • Bob Green, President
  • Dave Lo, Editor

To: Users of Robelle Software

Re: News of the HP e3000 and Robelle, 2001 #5

If you haven't been visiting the Robelle web site, www.robelle.com, at least once a week, here is what you have been missing. Included are many of the stories posted to the web since the last What's Up DOC newsletter in July 2001.

If you are reading a PDF or text version of this newsletter, remember that the headline of every story is actually a web link to the full story or more information. If you want to follow a link to get more information, go to the web home of the current newsletter:

http://www.robelle.com/library/newsletter/latest.html

Table of Contents:

 
Update Your Account
Add/Change CPUs
Contact Robelle

Ask Support
Technical Information
What's New?

Free Trials. Click for:
Qedit for Windows
Suprtool
Host-based Qedit

Partners
Ecometry Solutions
Healthcare Solutions
Education Users
Consultants Corner

Products
Qedit for Windows
Qedit for e3000
Suprtool for e3000
Suprtool Training

About Robelle
About the HP e3000
About HP-UX


News and Upcoming Events

HPWorld 2001: Photos and News

click for more hpworld pictures click for more hpworld pictures

Robelle had a good week at HPWorld and we snapped many pictures. Click the link above to find out about the "Most Fun Booth" and Bob Green's Top Ten Software Tips from the Dark Side

click for more hpworld pictures click for more hpworld pictures

3kworld: Winston Prather and Dave Snow at HPWorld

3kworld provides an easy to digest, bullet-style report on what was communicated by Winston Prather and Dave Snow during their plenary/strategic sessions at HP World 2001.

Bob Green Session for Summit Users

Credit unions are gathering in Melbourne Florida Sept 12-14, 2001 to share information on Summit's application package and improve their skills. Bob Green of Robelle will be present to give an afternoon session on IMAGE, Suprtool and improved batch processing. Read one credit union's experiences with Suprtool.

3000 Newswire: Ken Paul Starts Consulting Service

After 13 years of providing top-flight support for Adager and the IMAGE database users in the 3000 community, Ken Paul has become an independent consultant offering a variety of services for HP 3000 sites.

HPWorld: Vital-Soft Demos New Product That Uses Suprtool

Jon Overton announces the "MatchPoint Replication Suite" which allows you to easily replicate a TurboIMAGE database to an SQL environment for business decision support. Two interesting things about MatchPoint are that it can incrementally update the SQL side as your applications modify the TurboIMAGE side, and it uses Suprtool wherever possible to speed the replication process.


up arrow


HP Tips

mySQL: Importing HP e3000 Data

By Neil Armstrong and Aaron Holmes

Recently a friend needed to work with some data in mySQL to test a Web Application. I figured that I could provide some test data from one of our IMAGE databases and use our STExport program (part of the Suprtool product) to move the data over.

mySQL is an Open Source database that is commonly used as the backend database server for many Web applications for a huge number of Linux and Unix platforms as well as Windows machines.

The source and or binaries can be obtained from www.mysql.com or www.sourceforge.net and many other download mirrors around the globe.

In order to get started we decided to build a mySQL database that looked like an Image database, building a simple Master dataset and a single detail dataset. The byte type fields in Image were created as char fields. The I2 or J2 fields were created as int fields. The database resided on a small Windows 98 laptop system.

Having done this, we extracted data from the 3000 database and used default STExport settings to output a file that was comma delimited, with each field enclosed in quotes.

In investigating how to import data into mySQL, we first tried the mySQLImport program, but it didn't seem as robust and we could not figure out how to tell it what delimiters to use.

In looking at the documentation, we thought that the LOAD_FILE command might work, but further investigation showed that this command opens the file and returns the contents as a string. This feature is only used by Text and Blob columns of mySQL.

We finally had success with the LOAD_DATA statement after reading the documentation on the mySQL Website at:

http://www.mysql.com/doc/L/O/LOAD_DATA.html
We quickly tried importing the data with the default STExport settings. However, when we looked at the data, some records were not imported correctly. The records seemed to have the data offset by one field. We found the problem to be records with either quotes or commas in the data. Since these were also our delimiters and seperators we changed the Suprtool and STExport commands to the following:
 get m-customer
 out mcust,link
 xeq
 export in mcust
 export quote none
 export delim "?"
 export out mcustexp
 export exit
We got rid of the quotes surrounding each field by using the Quote None statement and changed the delimiter to a character that we knew did not exist in our data. In our case we chose the Question Mark.

Importing the data into our table then became a single simple command entered from within Mysql Monitor:

 load data infile 'm_customer_file.txt' into table m_customer
 fields terminated by '?';
Once we had the basics down for importing the datasets into the mySQL tables, we could then import the entire database into mySQL.

We were able to check the data using the mySQL admin tools, but for more flexible access we installed some PHP scripts for working with mySQL databases.

Overall, we found it relatively easy with STExport to duplicate our production IMAGE database structure and contents in mySQL. Of course, we did do a little studying in two books:


up arrow


Qedit

Qedit for Windows Tips

Edit Report Layouts By Row and Column

Every once in awhile I do some consulting to work on various applications for customers. This helps keep perspective on application programming and how customers use our tools in the real world. While changing the layout of a report written in Cobol (with Suprtool doing the data extraction) the customer was changing their mind about the layout of the report.

To help both the customer and myself write the report, I pasted in the current version of the report and edited the report using Qedit for Windows.

What I found really helpful was that by just turning on the View "Ruler Bar" I could easily see the layout and number of spaces for the Header lines.

Once this portion was designed, I could then use the View "Record Numbers" feature to count the number of lines in the report.

Once I had the design done, I could also test the line spacing and layout by printing the report to the screen and cutting and pasting into Qedit for Windows to insure that everything lined up and the Line counts were correct.

I realize that this is very "old school" but there are still some of us who do high volume, good old data processing and printing reports and using this newfangled Qedit for Windows provided a nice trick for this old programmer.

neil@robelle.com


up arrow


Suprtool

Suprtool Tips

Sync-up Your Master Totals Via Update-From-Table

By Paul Gobes, Technical Support

Suprtool added the Update-From-Table feature in version 4.4.10. You can read about this flexible new option in this NewsWire article.

Many applications keep a running total in the master record of all the detail transactions. You can use the latest feature in Suprtool to easily do this.

The following example reads the D-SALES detail set and summarizes the total sales for each customer.

 >base      store,1,writer
 >get       d-sales
 >sort      cust-account
 >duplicate none keys total sales-total
 >extract   cust-account
 >output    summary,link
 >xeq

 >input summary;list standard;x
 Aug 23, 2001 11:56

 CUST-ACCO ST-TOTAL-1

      123                       136193+
     4566                       723309+
 IN=2, OUT=2. CPU-Sec=1. Wall-Sec=1.

Now let's update the master dataset records. Notice the new syntax on the TABLE and the EXTRACT commands.

>table t-sales,cust-account,file,summary,data(st-total-1)
>get   m-customer
>if    $lookup(t-sales,cust-account)
>update
>extract sales-history = &
  $lookup(t-sales,cust-account,st-total-1)
>xeq
Finally, here is what the Master set records look like:
 >g m-customer;ext cust-account,sales-history;l;x

 >GET M-CUSTOMER (134) >OUT $NULL (0)
 CUST-ACCOUNT   = 4566  SALES-HISTORY   = 723309

 >GET M-CUSTOMER (187) >OUT $NULL (1)
 CUST-ACCOUNT   = 123    SALES-HISTORY   = 136193

paul.gobes@robelle.com

Convert Leading Spaces to Zeroes

Recently a user asked us how to convert leading spaces in an ASCII 'Numeric' field (i.e., Zoned/Display) into leading zeroes.

You can do it in Suprtool, but there is a trick to it. Click the link above to find out how.


up arrow


Links/Resources

Tech Group University: Fall MPE Classes

The Tech Group University 2001 Fall Semester Catalog and schedule of MPE classes have been published. The catalog now has over 90 MPE related training classes, with over 30 initially on the schedule, including Suprtool and Qedit. Please visit the virtual campus (www.TechGroupMD.com) to see which classes might be right for you.

HP e3000 Jobs: Amos and Associates

Diane Amos has been a recruiter in the HP field since 1986.

3kworld: Robelle is Building a Community

About Robelle and our place in the 3000 community.


up arrow


Internet Tips

Apache/iX: Documentation Web Page

Apache is a widely used web server that has been ported to many computing platforms. It is open source, free, reliable and fast. Apache is used to serve up web pages for some of the most famous sites on the internet. Click the link above for the documentation and links needed to install Apache 1.3 on MPE/iX and to get assistance.


up arrow


Newsletter Distribution

Robelle Solutions Technology Inc. provides the What's Up, DOCumentation? newsletter as a service to our customers. The newsletter is available on the web: in HTML format for browsing and PDF format for printing. Visit www.robelle.com/library/newsletter/

Comments about this issue, as well as ideas for future issues, including news, tips, and suggestions for articles, can be sent to bgreen@robelle.com.

Email This Page | © 2001 Robelle Solutions Technology Inc. | Fine Print