HandTools CDF Enhancement
Library for DataEase
HandTools is an EASsential CDF Library library add-in for
DataEase Release 4.5 and above. HandTools is a compendium of fairly basic functions
and procedures that provide additional capabilities that any serious developer will likely
come to regard as indispensable. HandTools supports, with limitiations, all versions of
DataEase beginning with 4.53r1. Limitations being some of the system functions supplied
with HandTools 2.0x that are specific to 4.5x DataEase will not work in DataEase 5.x and
should not be used.
HandTools Site Table of Contents
What are HandTools?
As most people who have ever attempted to build a refined, turnkey application using
any fourth-generation(4GL) language software platform knows, you usually must make some
significant compromises in flexibility and precise programmability in order to avail
yourself of the great leverage a 4GL provides. In an effort to free the programmer from
tedious re-invention of basic processes, 4GLs are designed with numerous built-in
assumptions about what you or your user are going to want and need out of your
application. While such an approach certainly permits radical reductions in design,
prototyping, modification, and support time, it also constrains your efforts to the
somewhat myopic scope ingrained into the platform. While DataEase's capabilities are
adequate a great majority of the time, there almost always arises a need to do something
that cannot be easily handled with its basic constructs and 57 functions.
Publishers of 4GLs have responded to this issue in a variety of ways, from not at all,
to providing DLL or compile-time linking capabilities with the outside world. DataEase
International has chosen, with the 4.5x release of the DOS product, to define a 'DLL-like'
environment and interface to provide low-level extensibility.
HandTools is collection of some very basic and fundamental
CDFs. I literally
could not develop even the most simple-minded project in DataEase without using at least a
few of these functions. The newfound ability to flash a message on the screen at a
particular position for a predetermined length of time during a DQL (both control and
processing) is a joy. And, how many times have you wanted to update information on the
display (beyond 'Message's capabilities) while you were running a DQL procedure that was
printing or updating? Well HandTools permits that.
Plus, HandTools gives you numerous data handling routines, DOS operating system
functions, text file input and output functions and string manipulation routines. At this
time HandTools contains over two hundred functions that are simple in concept but
will be simply invaluable to your DataEase development efforts.
The product is named HandTools, because it consists of the essential functions
that are numerous, small, quick, and useful, much as a toolbox full of screwdrivers,
wrenches, and sockets is essential to a mechanic. HandTools, as a rule, does not
consist of complicated functions.
With version 2.0, we tried to retain all of that which made version 1.0 so successful
while including a bevy of new functions, which, for the most part, were requested and
specified by customers who purchased version 1.0. In addition to the 128 functions of
version 1.0, we have nearly doubled the number of functions while addressing issues as
diverse as faxing to accessing previously concealed internal DataEase system data to
providing a convenient method for constructing cross-tab style reports to providing an
automatic phone dialer.
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