Last Day for Hotel Room Block!

Revelation USA have just sent out the following email about booking rooms for the conference. It is included here for anyone not on their mailing list.

As you are probably already aware, our 2010 User’s Conference begins on Tuesday, April 27th, just over four weeks from today.

However, the ability to book a room in our block at the Rio All Suites Hotel and Casino, the venue for the Conference, expires today. Booking a room in our block ensures a good price for you, the attendee, and it actually lowers the cost of the conference for us, because the Hotel knows it has customers for those nights, and they lower their charges to us.

Today is the last day that this block of rooms is being reserved for us. If you are thinking about attending the Conference, and even if you haven’t signed up for the conference, I urge you to contact the hotel and reserve a room. You can cancel if you decide not to attend, but you will have a guaranteed room if you do attend the conference.

Let me add that these are not your typical Las Vegas hotel rooms – the Rio is an All Suite hotel, and the rooms are great. You won’t be disappointed by them, and by staying in the same hotel where the conference is being held you’ll save a lot of time and cab fare getting around Las Vegas.

You can reserve rooms by calling 1-888-746-6955 and asking for the Revelation Software room block.

Thanks – we hope to see you at the show, where you’ll learn more than you would have imagined about what OpenInsight and Revelation Software can do for you.

What is an OpenInsight BFS?

Following a successful SQL Connector webinar recently, during which Andrew helped to better explain MFS’s and how they are used, the guys at Sprezzatura have written a superb blog posting that explains what a BFS is and how it works. This is a must read for anyone considering using the SQL Connector in OpenInsight 9.2, or those of you that just want to better understand Base Filing systems in OpenInsight.

Stay in touch with Rev News and Tech.

Any modern business needs to be utilising social media these days and that means maintaining and watching various blogs, RSS feeds, twitter feeds, etc. I myself have got quite into this over the last few months and I have made some useful contacts in the process, which have lead to some interesting business discussions.

However, keeping up to date with all of the feeds was becoming a daily chore and one that I felt was needlessly eroding half an hour or so of my day, and this was just keeping up with Revelation related topics. What I needed was a way to keep myself up to date whilst on the move - In the playground whilst waiting for the kids to finish school, whilst commuting to work or between meetings and discreetly whilst at home in the evening and especially avoiding the tuts and long faces from the family when the laptop comes out.

Well finally I have something that will hopefully help any OpenInsight developer or user keep up to date with the various feeds from the Revelation community, including the discussions bases. The only issue is that you need an iPhone, iPod Touch with an internet connection or a Smartphone running Android.

What I have done, is to create a small iPhone application that brings most of the Revelation news feeds, blogs and technical discussion bases together. If I am missing any, please let me know and I’ll do my best to include them.

For more information, please checkout my Revelation iPhone Application demo on YouTube and the application itself can be downloaded using the safari browser on your mobile device from http://m.wbx.me/revsoft-news.

Enhanced TCL

Did you know...
That in OpenInsight 9.2 there will be new TCL softkey functionality and a great new Grid view for list statement output:

- Shift-F1 – Link Multiple Commands (Makevoc)
- Shift-F4 – List Tables
- Shift-F5 – List Volumes
- Shift-F6 – TCL Assistant
- Ctrl-F10 – The Query Table

The query table is a list that stores the last 50 select statements, and their results, run by the system (from TCL) on a particular workstation. Pressing Ctrl-F10 from TCL will provide a list of the past queries, the time and date the query was run, and the number of results returned from the query. Choosing an item from the popup will return the results in an active select list.

Running a List statement with (G (for example LIST INVOICES CUST_NO CUST_NAME INVOICE_DATE ITEMS DESCS (G from the EXAMPLES application) will display the results in an EditTable on the screen. From there you can move columns around, copy the content, or part thereof, to the Windows clipboard and also sort and remove the data.

A complete review of all the new TCL features will be on display at our Conference next month and you can get a taster on my YouTube Channel.

O4W on an Apache Web Server

Aaron Kaplan has recently been working with OpenInsight for the Web (O4W) and I am pleased to hear from him that the toolset has been running nicely under the Apache web server, although some additional configuration steps were required, when compared to configuring it under IIS which is the web server covered in the O4W Quick start Guide. Aaron, was therefore kind enough to email those additional steps to me to share with my blog readers.

The first difference when installing and configuring O4W on Apache, is the requirement for an ASP support module. This is an open source third party module and it can be found at sourceforge.net. Once installed, you will then need to modify your httpd.conf file.

You’ll need to tell Apache and the ASP modules where to find the ASP files and directories. Please note, that in Aaron’s example below, you will need to change the paths to match your paths.

<IfModule mod_aspdotnet.cpp>
    # Mount the example app
    AspNetMount /examples/ "C:/revsoft/oinsight/9.1.1/O4W"

    #Alias in the examples directory to the O4W root
    Alias /examples/ "C:/revsoft/oinsight/9.1.1/O4W/"

    # Allow asp.net scripts to be executed in the O4W root
    <Directory "C:/revsoft/oinsight/9.1.1/O4W/">
        Options FollowSymlinks ExecCGI
        AspNet Files
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        DirectoryIndex Default.htm Default.aspx 
           apache-start.html start.htm
    </Directory>

    # For all virtual ASP.NET webs, we need the 
    # aspnet_client files to serve the 
    # client-side helper scripts.
    AliasMatch /aspnet_client/system_web/
       (\d+)_(\d+)_(\d+)_(\d+)/(.*) \
       "C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/
          v$1.$2.$3/ASP.NETClientFiles/$4"
    <Directory \
        "C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/
           v*/ASP.NETClientFiles">
        Options FollowSymlinks
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</IfModule>

You will also need to ensure that OECGI2 will run at its default location, which is outside a standard script alias. To achieve this, you will need to add a script handler:

AddHandler cgi-script .exe inside the section.

Once you have made these additional changes, you should be able to run O4W on Apache in the normal way. Aaron’s testing with the current O4W release continues and we will post updates to this blog posting as appropriate.

In the meantime, I would like to extend my thanks to Aaron for working with O4W on Apache and for sharing this information with us.

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN VEGAS IN APRIL 2010?

I have previously written about this years conference on my blog (see links below), but with only 41 days until the welcome reception, now is the time to book your place if you have still not registered but intend to join us in Vegas.

Revelation Software’s 2010 Users' Conference will be held at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, April 27th - Friday, April 30th, 2010 and, over the weekend, Revelation announced that the dinner event at the User’s Conference will include the PENN & TELLER show.

Contact NANCY RUANE (info@revelation.com) at Revelation Software in the New Jersey office in the USA for further details and to obtain booking details.

Conference Website Links:
WELCOME
VENDORS
KEYNOTE
TOPICS
SPEAKERS
REGISTER

Previous Blog articles:
http://revsoftuk.blogspot.com/2010/02/revelation-world-conference.html
http://revsoftuk.blogspot.com/2009/11/revelation-users-conference-2010.html

PayPal in O4W

Over the weekend, Revelation have announced that integrating OpenInsight for Web (O4W) with PayPal, the online payment provider, will be extremely easy using O4W’s APIs.

Using the PayPal “Buy Now” feature, your customers will be immediately able to purchase a single product direct from your website. Once your customer has selected “Buy Now” (either via a link or a button on your web page), your O4W stored procedure will use the O4WPayPal call to redirect the browser to PayPal’s on-line payment site, from where your customer’s transaction can be completed.

Using the PayPal “Add to Cart” feature, your customers will be able to purchase one or more products by adding them into their PayPal shopping cart through your site. Once your customer has selected a product to “Add To Cart” (either via a link or a button on your web page), your O4W stored procedure will use the O4WPayPal call to redirect the browser to PayPal’s online payment site. From there, your customers can review their shopping cart and then they can choose to return to your site to browse or add additional items to their shopping cart, or they can proceed to “Checkout” on the PayPal site to complete their transaction.

Using the PayPal “Add To Cart” feature, your customers will be able to review which products they have placed in their PayPal Shopping Cart, modify their selections or begin the PayPal Checkout process.

New TCL functionality for 9.2

As many of you will no doubt know, I have recently been working with the OI 9.2 alpha software to create a series of Getting started with OpenInsight videos. These are being hosted on YouTube in a playlist for people new to OI and they are designed to support our marketing campaigns that are currently going out to non-MultiValue developers – yes, were are once again out there spreading the word about MultiValues and OpenInsight in particular.

One of the new features in 9.2 is some enhanced TCL functionality for both ARev users (new ARev Softkeys supported) and OpenInsight users in general through a new Grid switch for a TCL list statement.

If you want to know more, please checkout my latest video that looks at the new TCL functionality coming in OpenInsight 9.2 in a few weeks time.

NOTE: The guys at Revelation are working extremely hard on the 9.2 release and since I recorded this video TCL has been further enhanced. The image above is a little difficult to see, but a graded background and the ability to drag one column to another location has been included. In addition, a lookup button has been included in the active Command cells prompting the user to click for further options (or to pick a command from the list). In my video I had to know that the cell needed to be double clicked.

Trapping EditTable Mouse Messages

Did you know that from OpenInsight version 9.1 it is now possible to trap mouse messages? Check out Sprezzatura’s latest blog posting for more information and example source code.

Optimise your OI deployments!

There is a very useful discussion on the Revelation Discussion Boards at the moment with regards to Universal Driver and the use of revparam files. If you are involved with deploying application at any level, this is a posting that you’ll want to check out.

http://revelation.com/OIdiscuss.nsf/All+by+Date/159B2E4E0BFD3328852576D6001BF5FF?OpenDocument.