SoftWoehr MyEditUtil 1.0

Programmer's Manual

Copyright © 2000 by Jack J. Woehr
P. O. Box 51
Golden, Colorado 80402-0051 USA
http://www.softwoehr.com

NO WARRANTY NO GUARANTEE FREE SOFTWARE.

Table of Contents

Overview

The SoftWoehr MEU classes in the package com.SoftWoehr.JTOpenContrib.MEU implement the remote source physical file member editor described the SoftWoehr MyEditUtil User Manual.  All source is present alongside the classes in the softwoehr.jar file; unpack the jar file to see the source.

Also present in the jar are the NetBeans forms which were produced by the design tool. They are included for the convenience of NetBeans/Sun Forte users, but are not necessary to compile, modify or run the application.

Source code documentation in Javadoc form is also provided, though in some cases it is perfunctory.

Design of SoftWoehr MEU

MEU is about 35,000 lines of Java code. About 1/6 of the code or less was autogenerated under the Sun Forte (NetBeans) Java IDE.

MEU was intended to be an enhanced emulation of a subset of traditional enterprise system terminal-mode editing. Access to the AS/400 is the most straightforward part of the MEU implementation. The complexity is in the exigencies of coding a row-oriented (record-oriented) editor using the stream-oriented editing widgets provided in javax.swing.

The paradox runs like this:

So in the interests of coding MEU as quickly and as neatly as possible under the circumstances, MEU's display technology is coded directly on top of javax.swing. This makes for extremely weird code in the file MEUTextArea.java which takes an approach resembling screen-scraping of its own JTextArea!

MEU uses com.SoftWoehr.JTOpenContrib.connectionmgr.Mgr to manage connections. This works in a fashion similar to JTOpen ConnectionPool (and antedates it). In the future, JTOpen's ConnectionPool objects will be supported by MEU.

Useful Exposed API's

As indicated above, MEU is not composed of particularly re-usable modules. It's a very nice hack and has to be taken whole. That is to say, the only useful thing you can do with MEU's code is compile it and invoke it, either

Using MEU from within an application

To summarize: In order to use MEU from inside an application:
  1. Create an MEU object instance using com.SoftWoehr.JTOpenContrib.MEU.MEU.MEU(String propertiesFileName, String serverName, String ifsPath)
  2. If you do not wish the user to be allowed to close the Java VM instance of your application by closing MEU, call  setAllowedToExit(false) on the MEU instance.
  3. If you wish to open additional MEU windows based on the same MEU instance, call  newFrame(java.awt.Point location, String serverName, String ifsPath) on the MEU instance.

Example

The MEU Popup Example illustrates this usage of launching MEU from a popup menu.

Bug Reports

Please send any bug reports to MEU_Bugs@softwoehr.com



Fairmount, Colorado
September 15, 2000