GNUe Traffic #90 For 19 Jul 2003

Editor: Peter Sullivan

By Arturas Kriukovas  and  Peter Sullivan

"is this not a GNUe related story or what - a python swallowed a goat - we need a pic of this creature so it can be our new real-life mascot =)"

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.	10 Jul 2003		Pre-query on a data source
  2.	11 Jul 2003		Possible release of Forms/Common without Designer
  3.	11 Jul 2003		SKUs and GNUe Small Business
  4.	13 Jul 2003		on-startup and other triggers in Forms
  5.	13 Jul 2003		Query returning no results creates a new blank record
  6.	15 Jul 2003 - 16 Jul 2003		Merging arias code into GNUe Small Business CVS
  7.	15 Jul 2003		popy and psycopg as alternative python drivers for PostgreSQL

Introduction

1. Pre-query on a data source

10 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 10 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Forms

People: Mike Vincent, Derek Neighbors

Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) asked "what does setting prequery on the datasource do?" Derek Neighbors (derek) explained this option "prequeries on start up. It used to be mandatory for lookup boxes - otherwise the lookup boxes would be blank :) So if you had a parts database - with a vendor field and the vendor field had a vendor id - you had a combo box that showed valid vendors to pick from to populate that field. If you didnt prequery the vendor datasource - then that combo woudl be blank on form startup" .

2. Possible release of Forms/Common without Designer

11 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 11 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Small Business, Forms, Common

People: Stuart Quimby, Mike Vincent, James Thompson, Jason Cater, Bajusz Tamás

Stuart Quimby (ToyMan) said he was "looking to pick up the thread again" - a new investor in his business was "looking for us to upgrade our accounting system" . Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) said there had been some progress on GNUe Small Business - he was "going to try and get at least something written for each thing this weekend and add a link to 'em from the main page" .

James Thompson (jamest) said "we need to release the tools again - work is ongoing in cvs but at a lesser pace" . He believed that Jason Cater (jcater) was mainly focusing on a GNUe-based POS (Point of Sale) system at the moment, which he needed personally. Mike said this was "looking pretty good - made me wanna hook up my bar code reader and start zapping things in the office when I played with it" .

James said that Bajusz Tamás (btami) had been adding functionality to GNUe Forms, including a native Win32 user interface driver, and "someone added activex support I see (something I never envisioned :)" . He knew "several people have added killer features to cvs - btami's work in windows alone deserves a release - however a few weeks ago I think jason needed a few weeks to fix up designer - so we're in a holding pattern" . However, he "can't recall any changes in forms that require a new designer - so i guess nothing would stop a forms/common release if it was needed" , with Designer following later.

3. SKUs and GNUe Small Business

11 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 11 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Small Business

People: Mike Vincent, Jason Cater, Chan Min Wai

Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) explained that a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) was "a way of identifying products" for inventory - a "'part number'" - typically, "a SKU is a number which represents an exact item, as for example my SKU# S12030104 might be a Nike model#244995 golf shirt that is Black and Large size" .

Jason Cater (jcater) said "I should have G/L committed soon" for GNUe Small Business - "using the gnue schema definitions - it's pretty much just arias w/gnue forms screens" .

Later, Chan Min Wai (dcmwai) said he had been "searching all over the net for a "standard way" of work doing (ERP, Stock ...) and I found that... it is all about money ..." Mike said "that's pretty much what the product (or item as it's currently called) management module" of GNUe Small Business "is about.. setting up a line of products, being able to build intelligent SKUs from pieces of information (if that's what you want)" .

4. on-startup and other triggers in Forms

13 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 13 Jul 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Forms

People: Mike Vincent, James Thompson

Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) asked whether the on-startup trigger was fired before the others. "Seems all the focus related triggers and on-newrecord etc, all get fired prior to on-startup.. so I get this chicken and the egg thing happening where I setup global variables in on-startup they get changed in an on-change trigger that gets data from a source and I was going to try using a pre-focusout trigger to update the data's source to reflect any changes" . James Thompson (jamest) thought to "set it up so that the app can init the trigger system then have a flag that says ignore triggers until flag is set." - "what we'd do is change the gnue-forms so that right before it fires on-startup it does a IntializeTriggerSystem() or some such thing" . James said he'd take a look at it.

5. Query returning no results creates a new blank record

13 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 13 Jul 2003"

Summary By Arturas Kriukovas

Topics: Forms

People: Mike Vincent, Jason Cater

Mike Vincent (Vee2d2) found out the problem that while doing a createResultSet(...) to test for the presence of data before proceeding, in case of empty result set, a new record was created. Jason Cater (jcater) asked whether the datasource was bound to a block and Mike confirmed that. In this case Jason offered to use datasource.createResultSet() then if block.isEmpty(): foo checking. Mike didn't think that this would help because "the problem was I would enter some things, do the check and *poof* I'm on a new record.. where I didnt want to be." He said another datablock creation had helped.

6. Merging arias code into GNUe Small Business CVS

15 Jul 2003 - 16 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 15 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Small Business

People: Derek Neighbors, Chan Min Wai, Jason Cater

Derek Neighbors (revDeke) asked Jason Cater (jcater) "is all the stuff you are checking into gnue-sb basically arias stuff? as it's starting to look a real mess" , citing a few specific concerns - "i guess i just get nervous with massive cvs changes and adds" . Chan Min Wai (dcmwai) thought "These change is just tempory" . Later, Jason confirmed "there is no long-term arias/ directory - it will be rm -rf'd shortly" and in any case "that's a repository, btw... it's not part of the gnue-sb cvs tree" .

The next day, Derek and Jason discussed how to structure the GNUe SB CVS as the arias code was being ported. Jason explained that the gnue-sb/arias subdirectory was a seperate CVS check out. Derek said this was his preference, "but figured it would be too much a pain :)" Jason explained ] "I did it because it wasn't really officially part of gnue-sb - and I just needed cvs somewhere" . Derek agreed - "as the goal is to move things into gnue-sb/" eventually.

7. popy and psycopg as alternative python drivers for PostgreSQL

15 Jul 2003 Archive Link: "[IRC] 15 Jul 2003"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Common

People: Mike Vincent, Jason Cater

Mike Vincent reported that "the schema navigator blows up when I try to open the Tables node under gnue_sb now and I'm coming up empty.. I dropped the db and started fresh even.. ;) which uncovered something else in the schema" . Jason Cater (jcater) said "you are creating the" GNUe Point of Sale (POS) "tables - those probably aren't ready" . Mike said this was working if he dropped all the tables "and the related sequences, indicies" .

Later, he deduced "It's a popy bug. I guess popy isnt return the oid as an int - switched back to psycopg and everything worked fine again" . Jason said he had "hit several issues w/popy in debian sid so had to switch back to psycopg" . Mike noted that "when I was trying to figure out what was happening I went into common's datasources/drivers/postgresql/Base/Driver.py and commented out the block of code ~188 that creates the list and instead printed what was getting returned" - it appeared to be returning string rather than numeric (object ID) results. Jason said this matched what he had been seeing - "it doesn't return native types. popy was wrapping native types for some reason with it's own classes - but they hadn't implemented all the __whatever__ methods - so some of our stuff was bombing" .

Sharon And Joy