Did You Know – ClientSetup

That you can push the OpenInsight ClientSetup out to each workstation on the network.

Each workstation that accesses an OpenInsight application requires several libraries and supporting MSI packages to be installed.  Revelation have published a new technical article that presents several methods to prepare new workstations using the ClientSetup.exe program provided in the OpenInsight directory.

OpenInsight should be installed and shared from a network folder before following the guidelines listed.  If you have not already installed OpenInsight please refer to the installation instructions and then return here to setup additional workstations.

Please Click here to learn more.

Did you know . . . (BRW)

… that the new OpenInsight Banded Report Writer (BRW) in OpenInsight 9.3 has a command line interface that you can use to launch your banded reports or perform other BRW functions?

To start up the Banded Report Designer, you can do the following:

CALL RTI_BRWSUPPORT("LAUNCH")

Once you have your report(s) defined, you can generate them programmatically using the following:

CALL RTI_BRW_GENERATEREPORT(rptFile, rptName, outputName, rptType, overrideListID, rptDetails, bUseGUI)

where rptFile is the name of the report group you saved the desired report(s) into and rptName is the name of the specific report to run (or “*” to run all the reports in the group). You may also specify a semicolon-delimited list of report names if desired.

OutputName is the path and name of the file to save the output to (if producing a PDF, HTM, etc. document) – leave this blank to generate printed output.

rptType is the type of output to generate, and can be PDF, TIFF, HTML, TEXT, XLS, or XLSX (or PRINT to generate printed output, but that isn’t really needed if you leave outputName blank).

overrideListID is the ID of a saved list that contains the record keys you want this report generation to use. If there is no overrideListID specified, but there is an active select list when RTI_BRW_GENERATEREPORT is called, then the active list will be used instead.

rptDetails is only used when the rptType is PDF – if desired, you can specify in rptDetails the access permissions for the PDF, and the password(s) for PDF access.

bUseGUI is a flag that indicates whether you want report generation to occur with a GUI (set bUseGUI to “1″) or without a GUI, i.e., silently (set bUseGUI to “0″). Note that if the output is going to the printer, you can also set bUseGUI to “2″ – in this case, you’ll get a full print preview window, instead of just a printer control window as you would if bUseGUI is “1″. Note that the default if bUseGUI is not specified is “0″ (no GUI).

You can also call, during SET_PRINTER, the LOADREPORT call; this will “embed” generated BRW output into OIPI output (this is only available when using VSPRINTER2, aka OIPI.NET). You’ll pass in to the SET_PRINTER call the name of the report group, the name of the report to include (“*” for all in the group, or a semicolon-delimited list), the overrideListName, and a flag (0/1) to indicate whether the BRW report is appended to the current output (1) or replaces the current output (0).

Note that in both cases (LOADREPORT in OIPI.NET, or RTI_BRW_GENERATEREPORT) you can if desired pass in a full report definition (which is just an XML string) in the “report group” parameter. In this way, you can actually access the report definition and modify it, or create one entirely programmatically.

If this is something you wish to do, you can use the following to read an existing report definition:

rptdef = RTI_BRWSUPPORT("READ", reportGroupName, bLockFlag)

where reportGroupName is the name of the report group, and bLockFlag is a flag to indicate whether the record should be locked (1) or left unlocked (0).

RTI_BRWSUPPORT is a handy function with a few different actions. We’ve already discussed LAUNCH and READ; you can also call it with the following actions:

DISPLAY: pass in the report group name and specific report name (in parameters 2 and 3) and the report will be displayed via OIPI.NET;

 

Article first published in the Revelation Software January 2011 newsletter and on www.revelation.com

You want to do WHAT with a Popup?

The guys at Sprezzatura recently found it necessary to colour individual rows in a popup.  The example used as a proof of concept was to create a Male, Female and Other popup with the rows shaded as Blue, Pink and White.  This could be very useful to many of us in our applications and for this reason the guys have created a new blog article which includes full details and example code.

Please head over to the Sprezzatura blog for the full article.

As many of you are now creating blogs for your own business, I will be grateful if you could both email me links to your blogs and also email me if you also have something useful, like the above posting, and that you would like to share with the Revelation community. I will then gladly link to it from my blog and mention it in the RevSoft News Bulletin.

Running OpenInsight on Citrix

People often ask me about the recommended configuration for OpenInsight running on Citrix systems and Revelation now have a useful configuration recommendation article available from the main Knowledge Base.  It is available by clicking here.

For those of you that I have forwarded information to over the last couple of years, here are some additional notes.  The general recommendation is still the same but Jared has informed me that you are not prevented from having different versions of the application.

If this is something that you need, then you simply create and use different shares for your application.  Let’s say you have a common set of database files in \\server\datafiles\compdata.  You could have an OpenInsight application in \\server\oi8\oinsight.exe that attached to \\server\datafiles\compdata.  In addition to this application, you could install OpenInsight in another location like \\server\oi9\oinsight.exe - making sure that you have the right number of licenses and don’t simply duplicate the licenses from the first system.  As long as the \datafiles, \oi8, and \oi9 paths all had REVPARAM files appropriate for the server machine then both versions should be able to share the same application.

O4W Quick Start Guide Video Series

Well the midnight oil has been well and truly burning in my office these last few days, but finally the O4W Quick Start Series of videos are now complete and published to the web. You can gain access to the series from the new O4W Quick Start Guide page on our website.

The video series works through extending the Clinic application that we built in the desktop tutorial series and it provides us with a great example if extending a small ‘existing’ OI application. When I began the desktop series, I had only planned on web enabling one form as an example. However, when I saw what we achievable (at my level) with O4W I went quite a fair bit further.

I hope that you find the series of videos useful and I’ll welcome your feedback as always. I should also say a special thank you to Bryan at RevUS for his patience in answering some silly questions at times and helping over a couple of small hurdles.

OI QSG – The Grande Finale

OK – So I was not done with the OpenInsight Quick Start Guide Video Series. As a few of you have rightly pointed out, I hadn’t done anything with the table on the Consultations tab on the Patient Entry window. Well, that just happened to leave a nice topic for a finale, encore, or whatever.

The 24th lesson (could this now be ‘learn OpenInsight in 24 hours’) is a feature length lesson in which we look at creating the facility to capture consultations (appointments), hook them up to the Patient window and we create a report for our hypothetical receptionists and doctors to see appointments for any given day.

In this final video (before I look at O4W), the lesson will pretty much summarise the whole series by working with the Table Builder, Forms Designer, Indexes, User Interface Workspace, Scripts and the Report Builder.

I hope that you find the series useful and that this last lesson puts the cherry on the cake.

The final page of the final chapter is complete and the book is now closed.

For those of you that have been following my OpenInsight Quick Start Guide series of videos, the last few videos have just been completed and they are either now uploading to my YouTube Channel or rendering for then uploading. Once uploaded, I will add them to the main OI QSG playlist and also link to them from our web site.

The last few videos look at using Query By Form (QBF) within our Patient Entry window, creating reports and making them available to our users, making use of Index Lookups in OpenInsight and finally we wrap up the application. I’ve not covered wrapping up with the RDK as that is a big subject in its own right and people often choose different deployment methods to meet their own needs. I’ll therefore leave that for the official training.

I hope that you find the series useful and I will be beginning work on the O4W QSG series very, very soon.

Installing OpenInsight into Citrix and Terminal Server Environments.

From time to time I receive requests from VARs and end-users on Revelation’s recommended configuration on Citrix, Terminal Server and similar environments. Until now, there was no real recommended advice on where the various OpenInsight components should be installed and people were left to find what works best for them, their application, their environment and the users.

During my many conversations with people, I have learned that a configuration that works well for one client needed a rethink and modification for another. Putting together a recommendation for OpenInsight was therefore always going to be a tough call and Revelation would run the risk of documenting one configuration that people would follow to the letter and find that it was not the right, or even the best, solution for them, their application or their users.

However, following a typical ‘why does it work that way’ conversion about running OpenInsight and Citrix, I discussed the possibility of having a recommendation white paper with Jared (Revelation’s chief networking professional in the New Jersey office), along with the necessary this is a starting point only caveats.

I am please to announce that overnight Jared has released a white paper on the ‘Best Practices for Deploying OpenInsight on Terminal Services and Citrix Environments’.

This guide is Revelation’s best practice advice and it provides people with a welcome starting point when deploying OpenInsight based systems to these environments that are becoming more and more popular. The paper has been put together from Jared’s experience of working with OpenInsight 9.x on Terminal Services and Citrix and you can read the full article on the RevUS web site at http://tinyurl.com/2346d96.

Finally, I’d like to extend my thanks to Jared for taking the time to put together this hugely useful document.

Removing Phantom Indexes

Whilst working on resolving a phantom index issue, John Godfrey from Carys Computing came across a useful little trick for removing the rogue index.

Faced with an unwanted phantom index on a table in his application, John turned to the database manager and diving into the Utilities -> Indexes menu, he ran the option to remove the phantom index. However, nothing happened, the phantom index remained.

John then tried to add the index so that he could then remove it. As expected, OpenInsight duly reported that the new index could not be added as one already existed – the phantom index.

John notes that, at this point, you can turn to the help system in OpenInsight. This points you towards the System Editor, in which you can change field 6 from a 1 to a 0, to indicate that no BTree index is active.

However, John has found a neat, quick resolution to the phantom index issue and one that he asked me to share with everyone through my blog. He states:

“To the errant field add an XRef Index. This magically makes the Index editable and removable. So go back in and remove the XRef and BTree Indexes as required.”

I would like to thank John for this contribution and I will welcome any more tricks like this that anyone comes across and who would like to share with my readers.

>New Tutorial Videos.

>

As many of you will have noticed, Revelation continue to extend the range of data connectors for OpenInsight. A data connector for Univision is in development and the D3 (TigerLogic) connector was a new feature in the recent 9.2 release.

Revelation US has recently released a couple of tutorial videos to accompany the D3 Connectors release. They include:

Setting up and working with the OI4D3 connector – Mike Ruane demonstrates OpenInsight’s connector technology and attaches data from TigerLogic’s D3 data server. Once the data has been attached, OpenInsight can then be used to quickly and easily create graphical or browser-based applications against a D3 database.

Creating an O4W report against a D3 database – Second in Mike’s OI4D3 connector series, this time he takes a look at using OpenInsight’s O4W Report Wizard against data from TigerLogic’s D3 data server. The O4W Report Wizard lets a user or developer create browser-based interactive reports.