Storing Application Data (Menus) in UD6 Version Control

Many Uniface applications are data driven - and some of this data such as menus and reference tables may need to be version controlled.

Provided that the table definitions follow the same general format as the Unifacce repository tables then it is possible to alter the UD6 configuration files to support application data.

A simple example

In our sample application a user menu is defined using two tables MENU_SET and MENU_CHOICE. The primary key of MENU_SET is APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME and the primary key of MENU_ITEM is APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME,SHORT_NAME.

The joins configuration file needs to be modified like this:

;
MENU_SET:APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME:APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME::.\sources\user_menu\*
MENU_CHOICE:APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME:APPLICATION_NAME,MENU_NAME,SHORT_NAME::MENU_SET
;

These line tells the UD6/CMtool Driver that the entities MENU_SET and MENU_CHOICE should be stored in files in the sub directory user_menu. There will be one file for each menu, and each of those files will contain the menu items within that menu.

It is NOT recommended that user tables:

• store binary data (data with a R(aw) packing code or similar)
• store more than 7Kb of data per row

Tables which store more than 7kb per row must also be listed in the overflows configuration file.

The only remaining step is to tell Uniface to store the table. This is done using the Assignment file, eg:

[ENTITIES]
.MENU $UD6:*.*

When the application is distributed to a client it is anticipated that this data would be stored in DB3 or another database - UD6 is used only as the repository for this information during development.

If the primary keys of MENU_SET or MENU_CHOICE contain spaces, then the tables must be listed in the USYS$UD6_PARAMS assignment file setting tableswithspaces.

Eg: USYS$UD6_PARAMS=tableswithspaces ;menu_choice;menu_set;, listoptions, etc etc