Wave Goodbye to the MDU

By Steve Ives, Senior Consultant, Synergex Professional Services Group.

If you have ever developed with xfServerPlus and xfNetLink then, like me, you may have a “love-hate” relationship with the Method Definition Utility (MDU). You love it because it is an enabling technology … it is one step in the process of extending your Synergy applications with all types of cool client applications. But at the same time you hate it … because it’s an inconvenience to have to remember to run up the utility and update the method catalog each time you want to add a new method, or change the interface of an existing one. Today, using the MDU is a “necessary evil”. It has served us well over the years, but things are about to get a whole lot better.

Synergy/DE 9 introduced many new features to the language, and some of these new features could make entering information into the MDU kind of redundant.  For example, rather than declaring a routine like this:

function get_product, ^val
    arg1     ,a ;Product code (passed in, a10)
    arg2     ,a ;Product record (returned, product record)

Synergy 9 allows us to define the routine like this:

function get_product, boolean
    required in  productCode    ,a10
    required out productRecord  ,sProduct

As you can see, we can now specify much more information about the external interface of a routine actually in the source code … and this additional information is the same as the information that we specify when defining the routine in the MDU.  But in 9.1 the picture wasn’t complete. There is still information that xfServerPlus (and tools like GENXML and GENCS) require from the method catalog, for which there is no language syntax to allow that information to be expressed in the actual code. For example, at a minimum we need to specify the name of the “interface” that the routine (method) will belong to, and the name of the library in which the routine in located.

Enter Synergy/DE 9.3, and an array of new features. One of those features is the introduction of support for “attributes”. Attributes are a mechanism which allows a programmer to “decorate” source code with additional information, or metadata, which provides information about the code. The metadata can then be used by compilers, or other tools that may process the source code in order to extract information, or take some other action.

We’re likely to see many and varied uses for attributes in Synergy/DE for .NET, but for now, as well as adding support for attributes in the language, 9.3 introduces the first use of attributes for Synergy/DE xfServerPlus developers.  Attributes can be used to provide all of the remaining information needed to automatically populate the method catalog!

Here’s the same function that we looked at earlier, but with an attribute added:

{xfMethod(interface="MyRoutines",name="getProduct",elb="EXE:MyLibrary")}
function get_product, boolean
    required in  productCode   ,a10
    required out productRecord ,sProduct

By the way, this is a simple example. There are many properties that can be specified in the xfMethod attribute, and there is also an xfParameter attribute which allows you to provide information about the routines parameters.

It’s also possible to specify “documentation comments” within source code, and these comments can be used to populate the method, parameter and return value description fields in the method catalog.  A routine with documentation comments would look something like this:

;;;<summary>Retrieves a product record.</summary>
;;;<returns>Returns true for success or false for failure.</returns>
;;;<param name="productCode">SKU of product to retrieve</param>
;;;<param name="productRecord">Returned product record</param>

{xfMethod(interface="MyRoutines",name="getProduct",elb="EXE:AttributeTest")}
function get_product, boolean
    required in  productCode   ,a10
    required out productRecord ,sProduct

Once you have “decorated” your code with attributes and doc comments, it is possible that you may never have to interact with the MDU ever again! But wait a minute … how does all this work?

Well, there is a new utility called dbl2xml, and this utility reads all of the information that is now contained in your source code and it creates an XML file containing just that information.  You can then load that XML file into the method catalog using a command-line invocation of the MDU program.  Of course you’ll probably automate these steps in the script that you already use to build your methods. The additional steps you’ll need will look something like this:

dbl2xml -out XFPL_SMCPATH:smc.xml SRC:AllMyMethods.dbl
dbr DBLDIR:mdu -i XFPL_SMCPATH:smc.xml

There is one “gotcha” with this new approach, and that is that you have to use the dbl2xml utility one time and process ALL of the code for all of the routines that are to be included in your method catalog. They don’t all have to be in the same source file, but the dbl2xml utility needs to process them all at once so that it can create the entire method catalog in a single pass. But that shouldn’t be a problem.

If you’ve ever done xfServerPlus development then I’m sure you’ll agree with me that this is a very nice new feature in Synergy/DE 9.3 … and it’s just one of many.

By the way 9.3 has been in beta for a while now. So if you want to check out the new features early, then why not help us to validate the release?  Head on over to www.synergyde.com, log in to the Resource Center, and download the beta today.

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