Managing and Tracking changes - Best practices

[PaulT]

Are there any guide lines or best practices for tracking Genie modifications and subsequent display file changes. Has anyone developed a methodology for tracking Genie modifications that are affected by display file changes in the underlying green screen.

[Megan]

Hello Paul,

The .scn files of the Genie skin's folder contain the modifications for matching screens. You can check these files to see what changes have been made to screens with a particular screen identifier. You can additionally use version control software that works on the IFS to keep track of changes and who committed them.

We hope this helps! Please let us know if these suggestions work for you or if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks!

[PaulT]

Thanks Megan.
I can see how I would be able to use our change management software (Implementer), to control the .scn files, but I am uncertain how to handle the updating of the .lst file with new screens, or updating screen data if identifiers have been changed. Do you have a suggestion for how to handle this?

[Megan]

Hello Paul,

Genie Screen Customizations contain 2 main components, the .scn file which contains all of the changes made to the screen, and a screens.lst which contains a little bit of info for every screen in the Screens folder of the Genie Skin. These files are unique to each skin, i.e. changes made in one skin will not appear in a different skin.

It is possible to get in the situation where a .scn file exists for a screen but is not correctly added to the screens.lst file. In this case the Genie skin will not know that the .scn file exists because it is not in the screens.lst. Typically this only occurs when the screens.lst file is manually edited because when a screen is saved in Genie it also automatically updates the screens.lst file. In order to fix such cases of missing screens from the screen list we have created a program that is shipped with Profound UI that should rebuild the screens.lst file from all of the .scn files in the Screens folder of the skin. You can call this program with the following command:

Code: Select all

CALL PGM(PUI0002103) PARM('/www/PROFOUNDUI/htdocs/profoundui/userdata/genie skins/MYSKIN/Screens')

Where PROFOUNDUI is the name of the instance and MYSKIN is the name of the skin for which you are rebuilding the list file.

If you are having issues with changes not being saved in your Genie Skin when multiple people are editing the same skin, you could try making a copy of the Skin via the Genie Administrator, then each programmer would work in their own Skin to make sure their changes are saved. Once the programmer has completed the edits they were making, they can then migrate their screen customizations to the main skin by first moving the files .scn files in the IFS to the new skin and calling the program above.

It is important to note though, if you are going to use this method the screen names must be unique and no 2 programmers can work on the same screen as their changes will be lost when merging the customizations together. You can find more information on moving Genie customizations here: http://www.profoundlogic.com/docs/displ ... nvironment.

What is happening here is that, when one programmer starts a Genie session by navigating to '/profoundui/genie' and logs in, Genie retrieves a copy of the screens.lst file and saves it in the web browser's local memory. When the programmer then edits and saves a new screen, the browser adds the entry to its local screens.lst file and submits that to the server to be saved as the skin's new screens.lst file, overwriting the previous screens.lst file. I am sure you can probably see how this could cause errors, such as "lost" screens or customizations, when multiple programmers are working on different screens in the same skin.

With that being said, it is possible to update the local copy of the screens.lst file mid-Genie session by hitting the Refresh button in the Genie Design Toolbar. Therefore we are recommending that when programmers start to edit a new screen of a skin, they should first press the Refresh button prior to making their edits. This will cause their local session to pull a new copy of the screens.lst file, but it will also remove any edits made to the screen since the last time it was saved. Because it also removes fresh edits, they cannot use it to refresh the screens.lst file just prior to saving, but reloading the screens.lst file prior to making the edits should reduce the number of screens that go missing. Additionally, using the PUI0002103 program that I mentioned earlier should restore all of the screens that have gone missing in your skin, because the changes in the .scn files are still saved, but have not added to the screens.lst file due to being overwritten by another person's screens.lst.

We hope this helps!

Thanks!

[PaulT]

Thanks for detailed explanation. That is helpful to know.