European User Group Meetings March 2014

[Anon Anon]

From March 15 through March 29, 2014, Dan Short (the CA Gen Product Manager) and I (the CA Gen Product Owner) traveled northern Europe and attended the following user group meetings as well as meeting with various individual customers:

• BeNeLux User Group on the 18th
• Danish User Group on the 20th
• German User Group on the 26th
• Finnish User Group on the 27th

We were well received and there seemed to be a lot of excitement about the amount of focus that CA Gen is receiving from CA management due to the recent organization changes as well as the latest releases and features being added to the product.

One of the most fun things that we did at the meetings was to allow the participants to "vote" on ideas that we taped to the walls of the meeting rooms (see attached pictures).  We gave each person five post-it notes and they were allowed to use those notes on one or more of the ideas (or they could use them to create new ideas as well).  Although this is definitely not a scientific approach to finding out what you, as the customers, would really like, the exercise did bear some interesting fruit.  Out of the 58 ideas that were on the wall, 46 got votes but the following 12 got the most (the total number of votes is the number at the beginning and note that this is across the four user group meetings as well as a couple of customer meetings):

• 36 Add Filtering on Dialog Boxes
• 27 Generate Action Blocks as Stored Procedures
• 22 Generate SQL Statements as Stored Procedures
• 19 Display Statement Numbers in the Action Diagram
• 19 Allow IN and BETWEEN Relational Operations in IF Statements
• 14 Allow Default Business System to be User Selectable Following Download
• 13 Support Changing an Existing Table's Primary Index
• 12 Dynamically Allocate Group Views
• 11 Unicode Data Type
• 11 SQL Server 2012
• 11 Implement Incremental Subsetting on the Host Encyclopedia
• 11 Filter Views in SET Statement at the Attribute Level

Please respond to this post if you have more pictures, if you attended the meetings and would like to comment on them, or if you have any comments/questions about the top rated (or other) ideas.  Note that we did this voting in anticipation of getting the Ideation functionality on the EDGE community site and if/when that functionality is available, all of the ideas that were voted on will be used to initialize that functionality.  We will also be using this information to help CA Gen decide what things should be worked on next (from the looks of things, dialog box filters and stored procedures are going to be right up there).

Thanx to everyone who was able to attend and special thanx to all that made this trip possible.

[Anon Anon]

Note that the pictures are on the message on the community site as they did not attach to the email. Please visit the EDGE community site for this thread to see the pictures.

From: CA GEN EDGE Global User CommunityMessage Boards [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 3:48 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [CA Gen General Discussion] European User Group Meetings March 2014


From March 15 through March 29, 2014, Dan Short (the CA Gen Product Manager) and I (the CA Gen Product Owner) traveled northern Europe and attended the following user group meetings as well as meeting with various individual customers:

* BeNeLux User Group on the 18th
* Danish User Group on the 20th
* German User Group on the 26th
* Finnish User Group on the 27th

We were well received and there seemed to be a lot of excitement about the amount of focus that CA Gen is receiving from CA management due to the recent organization changes as well as the latest releases and features being added to the product.

One of the most fun things that we did at the meetings was to allow the participants to "vote" on ideas that we taped to the walls of the meeting rooms (see attached pictures). We gave each person five post-it notes and they were allowed to use those notes on one or more of the ideas (or they could use them to create new ideas as well). Although this is definitely not a scientific approach to finding out what you, as the customers, would really like, the exercise did bear some interesting fruit. Out of the 58 ideas that were on the wall, 46 got votes but the following 12 got the most (the total number of votes is the number at the beginning and note that this is across the four user group meetings as well as a couple of customer meetings):

* 36 Add Filtering on Dialog Boxes
* 27 Generate Action Blocks as Stored Procedures
* 22 Generate SQL Statements as Stored Procedures
* 19 Display Statement Numbers in the Action Diagram
* 19 Allow IN and BETWEEN Relational Operations in IF Statements
* 14 Allow Default Business System to be User Selectable Following Download
* 13 Support Changing an Existing Table's Primary Index
* 12 Dynamically Allocate Group Views
* 11 Unicode Data Type
* 11 SQL Server 2012
* 11 Implement Incremental Subsetting on the Host Encyclopedia
* 11 Filter Views in SET Statement at the Attribute Level

Please respond to this post if you have more pictures, if you attended the meetings and would like to comment on them, or if you have any comments/questions about the top rated (or other) ideas. Note that we did this voting in anticipation of getting the Ideation functionality on the EDGE community site and if/when that functionality is available, all of the ideas that were voted on will be used to initialize that functionality. We will also be using this information to help CA Gen decide what things should be worked on next (from the looks of things, dialog box filters and stored procedures are going to be right up there).

Thanx to everyone who was able to attend and special thanx to all that made this trip possible.
Posted by:JCarter
--
CA Communities Message Boards
113699984
[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
https://communities.ca.com

[Anon Anon]

We just posted presentations from the EMEA 2014 User Group meetings under the Documents | Conferences | EMEA | EMEA 2014 folder.  Enjoy! 

[Daniel Stratton]

Honestly, while supporting IN and BETWEEN for conditional clauses is useful, I would really kill for supporting a Group View as the source information of data for an IN statement. 

There is a significant amount of logic in applications I work on where the number of entries I want to use in a comparison can vary, and having to do different READs depending on numbers is very frustrating.

[Anon Anon]

Are you saying that you would like to have the option of including a view (be it group or entity) as a parameter of the IN clause rather than explicitly entering values? So instead of saying
...IN (3, 6, 9, 12)...
you would say
...IN (<entity/group view reference>, <entity/group view reference>,...)...
?
________________________________
From: CA GEN EDGE Global User CommunityMessage Boards [[e-mail]]
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 10:20 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [CA Gen General Discussion] RE: [CA Gen General Discussion] European User Group Meetings March 2014


Honestly, while supporting IN and BETWEEN for conditional clauses is useful, I would really kill for supporting a Group View as the source information of data for an IN statement.

There is a significant amount of logic in applications I work on where the number of entries I want to use in a comparison can vary, and having to do different READs depending on numbers is very frustrating.

Posted by:Daniel_Stratton
--
CA Communities Message Boards
115026148
[e-mail]
https://communities.ca.com

[Daniel Stratton]

JCarter:

Are you saying that you would like to have the option of including a view (be it group or entity) as a parameter of the IN clause rather than explicitly entering values? So instead of saying ...IN (3, 6, 9, 12)... you would say ...IN (<entity group="" reference="" view="">, <entity group="" reference="" view="">,...)... ? ________________________________ </entity></entity>

<entity group="" reference="" view=""><entity group="" reference="" view="">

Essentially, yes.  I'd like to prepopulate a group view (passed in or constructed), and be able to use that group view as the source of the values for a READ/IF.  It's a fairly common pattern in dynamic filtering or duplicate check for pushing into a group view.  For example:

SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 1
SET lcl_g type TO 3
SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 2
SET lcl_g type TO 24
SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 3
SET lcl_g type TO 75
+- IF in_request type IS EQUAL TO 4
   SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 4
   SET lcl_g type TO 36
+-

READ EACH product
WHERE type IN ( grp lcl_g type )

When I first heard about IN being available, I was quite hopeful.  But to do this sort of thing as currently implemented would require 4 distinct entity instance views, and I would have to manually fill the unused ones with previously supplied type codes.  And that just makes the code messier and less readable.  Having a single group view I can populate would make the code more readable, less error prone and easier to debug.

(Edited to provide non-consecutive numbers to better demonstrate the issue)

</entity></entity>

[Anon Anon]

In your example, it appears that you want to just pass a single instance of a group view to the IN clause whereas I was assuming that all instances of the group view would be passed to the IN clause (i.e. in your example below, the clause "IN (3,4,5)" would be replaced by "IN(grp lcl_g type)". Is that not what you were thinking or are you looking for some way to have it both ways? For instance, an explicitly indexed group view would only pass a single instance whereas an implicitly indexed group view would pass all instance that have data, or something.
________________________________
From: CA GEN EDGE Global User CommunityMessage Boards [[e-mail]]
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2014 8:45 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [CA Gen General Discussion] RE: [CA Gen General Discussion] RE: [CA Gen General Discussion] European Us

JCarter:
Are you saying that you would like to have the option of including a view (be it group or entity) as a parameter of the IN clause rather than explicitly entering values? So instead of saying ...IN (3, 6, 9, 12)... you would say ...IN (, ,...)... ? ________________________________

Essentially, yes. I'd like to prepopulate a group view (passed in or constructed), and be able to use that group view as the source of the values for a READ/IF. It's a fairly common pattern in dynamic filtering or duplicate check for pushing into a group view. For example:

SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 1
SET lcl_g type TO 3
SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 2
SET lcl_g type TO 4
SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 3
SET lcl_g type TO 5
+- IF in_request type IS EQUAL TO 4
SET SUBSCRIPT OF grp TO 4
SET lcl_g type TO 6
+-

READ EACH product
WHERE type IN ( grp lcl_g type )

When I first heard about IN being available, I was quite hopeful. But to do this sort of thing as currently implemented would require 4 distinct entity instance views, and I would have to manually fill the unused ones with previously supplied type codes. And that just makes the code messier and less readable. Having a single group view I can populate would make the code more readable, less error prone and easier to debug.







Posted by:Daniel_Stratton
--
CA Communities Message Boards
115133906
[e-mail]
https://communities.ca.com

[Daniel Stratton]

JCarter:

In your example, it appears that you want to just pass a single instance of a group view to the IN clause whereas I was assuming that all instances of the group view would be passed to the IN clause (i.e. in your example below, the clause "IN (3,4,5)" would be replaced by "IN(grp lcl_g type)". Is that not what you were thinking or are you looking for some way to have it both ways? For instance, an explicitly indexed group view would only pass a single instance whereas an implicitly indexed group view would pass all instance that have data, or something. ________________________________

No, your assumption was correct - I want all instances of the group view to be used.  I perhaps wasn't clear enough in my expected requirements.

In essence, what I want is:

1. To be able to use a group view (implicit or explicit) as the source of values
2. To be able to specify which entity/attribute within the group to use for the comparison
3. To not have to restructure my code to deal with a language or implementation limitation

If I've got a component that's been called which has a group view with a single workset containing multiple attributes supplied, I want some control over which attribute is used for the IN clause.  I don't want to have to alter the component consumer to constrain to a group with with a single workset/entity with a single attribute.  I don't want to have to use a local view and do data reshuffling to get what I want.  I'd just like to be able to use the group view with a specific attribute as a source of values.  How you choose that syntactically would be up to you, obviously.

In essence, the introduction of a useful new ability, without having to (potentially) significantly alter call chains or code flow, just to take advantage of it.

I hope that clarifies my thoughts on the matter for you.

[Tim Dargavel]

And a couple more pictures John - Dan in the Priory in Belgium, and Michael dealing with the Elephant in the room in Copenhagen!