Uniface Social Media Integration

Uniface systems are traditionally large systems used by bigger companies for their internal administrative processes. And Social Media is all about sharing information and experiences on the Web. So where is the connection?

The connection is in Social Media Marketing. This is a very broad concept and the word Marketing is a bit misleading. It is about getting in touch with your customers, communicating with them, improving the customer experience and your brand identity. And in the process your sales will increase. And if you do it right your customer support costs will go down.
An interesting book to read is The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko.

For example, you sell products. In your enterprise application you discount the price of a certain product. You could post this automatically to your companies Facebook page, with a link to your web shop.

Or when you are an insurance company you could scan your database for a specific target audience, try to find these people on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and invite them to watch a YouTube video that is interesting for them.

A lot of this possible in the current Uniface 9.4. I just finished a Proof of Concept for integrating Uniface desktop applications with the Facebook API and it works very nice. The biggest hurdle to take was to implement the authorization mechanism. Facebook uses the upcoming OAuth 2.0 standard for that, and many more sites are starting to use this standard so now they should also be easy to connect too.

Over the next weeks I will make a sample so Uniface developers can take a look at how we did it.

PS
Go visit the iCU2011 on May 10th a preview of Uniface 9.5. With the new JavaScript options yet another world of web application integration opens up. And have a chat at the Uniface Services booth about your ideas for integrating Uniface applications with Social Media.

Exporting to separate files

By default, when you export your sources from a Uniface repository you get one big file with all the objects that fit the profile. Sometimes you may need separate files for each object. There is a simple way of achieving this.
(This works for Uniface 8 and 9)

Step 1:
Go online and find a free version management tool that is SCCI based.
You do not need to install it if you just want clustered exports, you just need the .DLL.
(I use igloo.dll)

Step 2:
Goto Utilities -> Preferences -> System
Enter the location of the DLL.

Step 3:
Press the Clustering… button.
Adjust the settings to your own taste.

Step 4:
When doing an export, make sure the option Use File Clustering Defaults is checked.

Step 5:
Check your result.

Uniface Open Source

I have been making and distributing Uniface samples and utilities for a while now.
Usually upload these to my www.box.net account.
Then I "spam" the link to my blog, www.uniface.info, the Uniface Group on LinkedIn and the Uniface page on Facebook.
This works pretty well, I am getting a nice number of pageviews and downloads.


But since making these samples and utilities is something that I do in my spare time, they are never perfect, and I cannot offer support on them.


Every now and then somebody mails me an improvement, for which I am very gratefull.
But it made me think that there must be a better way.
I do not want to own and maintain my own website so a public open source platform might be an interesting idea.


I am a total novice at this, but I gave it a first try on SourceForge. You can find the CompileMaster that I published last week also on SourceForge.


Any idea's on how to proceed with this are more than welcome.

Change entity, compile forms

It is something all experienced Uniface developers know:
If you change an entity you must recompile all Uniface components where it is painted on.
Uniface uses the entity definition as found in the first component that opens the table.
It is very easy to forget a component, and it takes a long time to compile the entire application.

My colleague Karl Janowiak has made an excellent tool to help you with this.

It checks the last compilation date of the component against:
   - Last modification date of the component
   - Last modifcation date of the subtype
   - Last modification date of the entity
   - Last modification date of any of the fields of the entity

Press the download button to get a zip file with a Uniface export and a readme file.

Thank you Karl !

Fancy Menu

Earlier I made a sample on how to emulate a harmonica widget. And I also made one on glassy buttons. It is quite easy to combine these two into a pretty fancy menu. Clicking each main menu option expands it to show the options. When the mouse pointer passes over a button, it will light up. In the document I explain how I made it, and in the accompanying export you will find all sources.

Engineering World 2011 - Presentatie

This month I spoke on Engineering World 2011, the conference for Dutch software engineers.
Connectivity has always been important for Uniface, and that continues with Cloud Computing.
It is partly in Dutch.

Sample for Glassy Buttons in Uniface

One of the things that I keep hearing when discussing User Interface design are Glassy Buttons. It is not so difficult to create these in Uniface, you just have to think a bit outside the box. In the document I explain my way of doing it, and in the accompanying export you will find all sources.