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WDSc Survivor

Five Brave RPG Programmers Move from PDM/SEU to WDSc

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November 29, 2004

Thankful for beta test code...

One of the advantages we have as part of this effort to describe our experiences with WDSC is that we have a channel to report problems directly to the development team inside IBM. This past week they really came through, and fixed a nasty bug with a memory leak (which was probably the source of the Outline View locking up.) We are now beta testing it for them, and so far it is looking good. Great job IBM!

Because the Outline view is now usable, I am back in the WDSC environment, and it is helping. Since the bug fix (which should be available on their web site in the near future), WDSC takes much less time to load, and the individual functions seem to work faster as well. One item we discovered during this process is that there are diagnostic logs which may grow very large over time, and just clearing the log files will make a significant difference in the startup speed for WDSC. Another tip to help keep it from locking up is to use one of the compile options 1st, to be sure that the library list for WDSC is correct, and that it can find all the files and /COPY members that it needs to create its indexes with.

Now that I am using the Outline view more, I have some ideas on what I would like to see it do, that are not in it right now. We will be having an internal discussion on developer topics later this week, and will probably send in to IBM a list of features we would like to see after that meeting. One of the first things on my list would be a quick way to jump back and forth between the editor in full screen mode, and the related outline view (right now I can go from full screen to the multiple window view, but there is no key combination to shift back to the previous editor session AND shift into full screen mode.) The other big item would be a “find” option in the outline view; so that I don’t need to scroll through data structures, fields, files, etc looking for a field name, or could quickly position to a subroutine in a long list of them. (These are minor items compared to the bug they just fixed; so thanks again guys.)

And now, back to the code...

Posted by at November 29, 2004 12:29 PM

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Comments

Hi Dave,

In order to switch between the outline view and the full-screen editor without using the mouse give this a try:

1. Right click on the title bar of the outline view and select "Fast View" from the pop-up menu. This moves the view over to the far left side of the workbench (showing as an icon under the icons for all your open perspectives.) Fast views do not show in the main workbench window but instead hover overtop when the icon is clicked.

2. Now maximize the editor.

3. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F7 to switch between the open editor and the outline view (which is now a fast view.) The first time you do this you may have to hold down the Ctrl key and press F7 multiple times until the outline view is selected in the list of all the open views. But after that you will be able to quickly switch back and forth between the editor (in full screen mode) and outline view by just pressing Ctrl + f7 once.

4. You can navigate the outline view without the mouse by using the cursor keys and typing in the keyboard (this follows standard Micrsoft tree navigation practises.) For example to go to the next item in the tree that starts with "sub.." just type sub.... To collapse and expand a node in the tree use the left and right arrow keys when the node is selected.

Hope this helps.

Don Yantzi

Posted by: Don Yantzi at November 30, 2004 11:24 AM

You can do what Don suggests, or you can just download my free iSeries Editing Perspective which takes Don's ideas and just pre-installs it as a Perspective in WDSC. You can then just switch to that perspective when editing (which should be virtually instant) and the views are all arranged for you to use maximum screen space.

We do not have a special install for this, as most people already have our free Spooled File and Messages plugins and it is available from the same place.

Mark

Posted by: Mark Phippard at December 1, 2004 11:13 AM

Any ideas when the memory leak fix might be available publicly? I've been missing my outline view for too long now :(

Posted by: Adam Glauser at January 3, 2005 9:46 AM

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