Hi all (mostly Ocean guys :), in the last couple of months I’ve been actively working to add support to OPTs in my software instead of using archetypes directly as I was doing before.
I’m very close to the full support for OPTs in software and I want to get a smooth process from the creation/use of archetypes, creation of templates, generation of OTPs and use of OTPs for UI generation, DB schema generation, data validation and data querying.
The only problem I have right now to get a smooth process is that the Template Designer crashes from time to time. A while ago I asked why the TD was crashing, and I think it was something about configuring the archetype repos. I think the tool should be robust enough to not crash and ask the user for the needed information.
My main question here is if Ocean right now has any interest of improve the TD (I think is a great tool and with little work it can be very robust), because I want to use it as a reference tool for my courses & workshops. What I can offer is to do detailed QA of all the functionalities on the tool and report all the problems I can find.
The other question would be if the TD source is open, because in the case Ocean can’t have someone fixing bugs on the TD, I can propose a project in my university for students that can (re)write the TD with Java technologies (I’m good with C# but I’m creating an open source technology stack based on Java/Groovy/Grails).
That second option will require more time for sure and the results might not be 100% satisfactory. With the 1st option I think all the community will benefit from it, but it will depend on the available resources.
Ocean does work on the TD, but also intends to open source it. The only barrier to this is that some code has to be removed that connects to internal Ocean tools, also we need to check on any non-open source libs that might have been used. We are being slower on this than we should, but it should happen in the next few weeks. Agree with all your comments below.
With respect to rewriting the TD, the intention is to create a new tool that replaces the Archetype Editor and Template Designer, and implements all the logic of the ADL 1.5 workbench. Some work has been done on the core compiler, but not much on the tool. I have done some work estimates on this in the past, and believe it is a fairly serious piece of work that needs to be project-managed properly (i.e. by its developers) and componentised properly. A project will be announced fairly soon to do this, and all interested developers are invited to take part. Early discussions will centre on a component roadmap, team structure, and exact technology (e.g. Eclipse, Groovy, .... ).
As a stopgap, the imminent open source availability of the TD should help with dealing with bugs like the one you report.
Hi Thomas, sorry for the delay, I’m moving out and the process is taking a lot of time.
That’s great! Maybe before open source it, I can help to improve robustness doing formal QA. With a robust TD we (the community) don’t need an open source tool, but a free to use tool that we can rely on. Maybe after that, going open source is a good way to look for improvements. Also releasing design documentation (i.e. open architecture) so we can write our own ports to different technologies, that would be nice but I don’t want to lose focus here!
Going back to the current TD. IMO it would be good to have a robust TD with support to ADL 1.4, I think it should support current developments better before supporting next-gen standards like ADL 1.5. Of course, the focus is defined by Ocean and not by the community, just want to make a point that most of our platforms are 1.4 and may not support 1.5 in a while. In my case, I know that 1.5 will work for archetypes and OPTs, but since all my tooling is 1.4 and I’m just taking the next step into OPT, I see support for 1.5 archetypes and templates a little far away, mainly for my lack of resources and how slow I’m doing progress.
Without knowing what’s going on in the internals, my guess it most of the problems are related to missing validations at the GUI that violate internal constraints, with a mix of poor error handling (maybe not catching all the exceptions from the logic) so the app crashes very often. I really don’t know if it’s a lot of work to check out where the issues are if the test cases are fully reported (I can compromise myself on doing that if someone from Ocean can take a look at the code internally). Maybe this can take a couple of days and we can find/fix some dummy bugs that bother users with unhandled exceptions. If this is possible, we can coordinate to work on this, as I say, just for a couple of days to fix simple bugs and document more complex bugs.
For QA I can make a video via Google hangout and show what I do step by step to get the errors and some issues I faced in the past about archetypes translation and OPT language.
A detailed problem report is the first step towards getting a bug fixed.
It’s possible that some of the problems you are finding have already been fixed if you are using an old version. Which version are you using? (The version is in the Help | About menu.)
Thanks Ian, sorry for the delay (a new training project about Mirth just came in!).
The version I have is 2.6.1214Beta, don’t know if that’s the last revision of the 2.6 version.
One issue I had, not related to crashes, is the difficulty to select the language for the template/OPT, I couldn’t find where I can specify the language. It seems TD is detecting my environment language (es), but don’t know how to change it e.g. for english.
Also if there are mixed archetypes, some that specify just the language e.g. es, and others that have also the country e.g. es-AR, the concept name is not shown for the es-AR archetypes. I think TD should fallback to the nearest language, e.g. if the template is in “es” and there is an “es-AR” archetype that doesn’t have “es”, treat the “es-AR” as “es”.
I’ll try to specify some workflows to do QA and give you some feedback on the problems I found. Just need to be sure if my version is the latest public available version.
thanks!
PS: one strange thing that happens when opening the Help > About window, is I have to click a lot of times on “Close” button to close the window, somehow it seems to be disabled, and after some clicks on other windows and then click on “Close” it works as expected.
The version I have is 2.6.1214Beta, don’t know if that’s the last revision of the 2.6 version.
That’s interesting, the latest 2.6 version that we have is 2.6.1213. Our downloads server crashed here last year and maybe we lost a version.
One issue I had, not related to crashes, is the difficulty to select the language for the template/OPT, I couldn’t find where I can specify the language. It seems TD is detecting my environment language (es), but don’t know how to change it e.g. for english.
You can use the /l: command-line switch. For example, to select Spanish, you could edit your Template Designer shortcut:
You have to specify a culture-specific language, i.e. you must include the country. Once you’ve done this, you will see the language code in Template Designer’s title bar.
The Archetype Editor has had much the same capability for the last couple of years too.
I just double checked, yes that’s my version (rev 1214)
The difference with the AE is that has a locale change using the menu on the UI, will try the command line for the TD, but I think doing this from the UI is simplest. Maybe that can be a nice feature to request (?)
Archetype Editor’s menu option to change to a different language is different from the command-line option:
The command line option overrides your computer’s locale. For example, when in England, your computer’s locale is probably “en-GB” and the user interface will be displayed in English. Archetypes will also display the “en-GB” terminology, if available, falling back to the neutral “en” if need be. If you specify the “es-UY” command-line option, however, the user interface will be displayed in Spanish and archetypes will display the Spanish terminology, if available.
The menu option to change to a different language does not affect the language that the user interface is displayed in. It only chooses which language the current archetype is displayed in.
Template Designer can do the former, but to the best of my knowledge it cannot do the latter. So I guess what you’re asking for is the ability to use Template Designer in one language but to choose a different language for the template.
In the meantime, you can use the command-line /l: option. Like the Archetype Editor command-line option, it changes the whole user interface, including the template and archetype terminology. It also changes the OPT export language. Yes, this is a very inconvenient way to view a template in a different language, especially if you don’t know how to read the language that you’ve selected!
Hi Peter thanks for the explanation, I would take hours trying to understand how this work.
Yes, in fact I prefer to use the UI in english and create archetypes and templates in spanish.
Maybe the problem I had was that the TD selected “es-UY” locale so I can see “es” terms, but I can’t see “es-AR”. I think it would be nice to have a fallback rule on the language of the archetype like:
if the selected locale is different than the archetype locale and both have country specified, if they match in the language part, use the archetype locale to get the terms instead of the locale selected for the environment (I use this rule a lot).
So if the environment is es-UY, I can show terms from archetypes in “es”, “es-UY”, “es-AR”, etc, if there is no better match in the archetype.
