Compiling Strategies

Compiling Strategies for Progress 4GL

The Jargon Software RDU program (Remote Development Utility) provides an easy way to compile individual Progress programs or groups of programs on your host system, without running a Progress editor session to do so. This is especially useful when working with remote Windows servers over the Internet, where you do not have direct access to a Windows session and typically have no telnet capability.

Compiling One Program with RDU

The "Compiling" window in RDU allows you to compile individual programs for syntax only or to compile and save. You simply:

enter the directory containing the program to be compiled in the "Directory" textfield
enter the program name in the "Program Name" textfield
check "Compile with Save" if you wish to create a ".r" file
click the "Submit" button

You can also click the "Browse" button to open the "Browse Server Files" window to locate a program to be compiled. After finding and selecting a ".p" program in the browse window, click "Select" and the directory and filename of the selected program will be filled into the fields on this Compiling window for you.

The result of the compilation and any error or warning messages will be shown in the "View Host Data" window when the host returns the results of the compilation. After reviewing the results, click the "Back" button on that window to return to the Compiling window.

If the program pathname is not in your current working directory and is not under one of the entries in your current session's PROPATH, you can enter the full pathname of the program to be compiled, starting with "/" or "C:\" (etc.). However, be sure that the "jsi" directory is in the PROPATH of the Progress client.

Compiling Multiple Programs with RDU

There are two ways to compile groups of programs in one step.

1. Wildcards.

This method is like the above steps for compiling a single program, but instead of an individual program name, you enter a wildcard such as "*.p" (without the quotes) to compile all the program ending in ".p" in the specified directory. Similarly, you could enter "app1*.p" to compile only programs whose filenames start with "app1" and end with ".p".

Note that this method can only compile programs that are all in the same directory. It does NOT recurse into subdirectories.

The asterisk character matches zero or more characters in a file name. Note that any periods are treated literally, so that strings like ".p" can be matched literally (instead of using the period as a wildcard that matches any single character as it does in the normal Progress "matches" syntax).

2. Compile Lists.

This approach uses a textfile with a list of programs to be compiled, which is read by the compiling routine. It compiles each program and creates a log file that is displayed in the "View Host Data" window when it is done.

Create a text file with one program pathname per line. If you put each such file inside the subdirectory which contains the programs to be compiled, you could use a standard filename such as "complist.txt". (You are using subdirectories, we hope!)

The pathname of each program entry in the file must be relative to the current working directory, or relative to one of the directories in the session's PROPATH, or an absolute pathname (starting with / or C:/ etc.).

For example, let's say that your WebSpeed or AppServer working directory is /jargon (or C:\Jargon on Windows), and you have a subdirectory named "myapp" which contains three application programs (aa.p, bb.p and cc.p).

Then, simply create a "complist.txt" text file in "myapp" which contains three lines:

myapp/aa.p
myapp/bb.p
myapp/cc.p

You can use forward slashes in these program pathnames, even on Windows systems, bccause Progress knows how to interpret them correctly for whichever operating system is being used.

On unix systems, a simple way to create this file would be to enter the following shell command while in the /jargon directory:

ls myapp/*.p >myapp/complist.txt

If the myapp directory also contains subdirectories (like "myapp/reports"), a different command can be used that will find programs in all nested subdirectories of myapp as well as in myapp itself:

find myapp -type f -name "*.p" -print | sort >myapp/complist.txt

On Windows servers, you may have to create the file by hand unless you have some other way to do so, possibly via a third-party tool like Cygwin that provides unix-like shell commands on Windows. (Cygwin is freeware and is highly recommended.)

To run the compiles from RDU:

enter the directory containing the compile list file in the "Directory" textfield
enter the compile list filename in the "File containing program names" textfield
check "Compile with Save" if you wish to create ".r" files
click the "Submit" button

The result of the compilations and any error or warning messages will be shown in the "View Host Data" window when the host returns the results of the compilation. After reviewing the results, click the "Back" button on that window to return to the Compiling window.

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