Calling Progress DB Admin Utils Directly

[Brendan McCaffrey]

Hi,

At the moment, I have the enviable task of writing a Progress Deployment Utility to install or upgrade our flagship product GlobalDMS on any flavour of Unix OS.

This is my second attempt, after the first version had it's limitations.

With this attempt I want to get it right at all stages....
Which is the reason for the question ...

Given that any customer will already have Progress 7, 8, 9 installed and $PATH pointing to the license, can I directly call Progress Corporation coded utilities ?

For instance, to load all .d's can I call the same routine as is in the Db Administrator ?

To update the schema's can I call the common object to do this ?

Are these programs the same name in all licenses of Progress ?

I would also like to hear from other developers on how they deploy their products to the customer.

I am attempting to develop a
"Load CD and Go" installer.

Best Regards

Benji
Global Automotive Uk Ltd.

 

[Chris Kelleher]

Hi there,

Yes you can call the Progress routines to load data (.d) and schema changes (.df). In fact, all these utilities are written in Progress themseleves and you should have the source code available (usually in DLC/src/prodict directory).

To load a .df file, simpily use something similar to:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Verdana">code:</font><HR><pre>
pro -db mydb -p myloaddf.p

/* myloaddf.p */
RUN prodict/load_df.p ("mydelta.df").
[/code]

Loading .d data is similar:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Verdana">code:</font><HR><pre>
pro -db mydb -p myloadd.p

/* myloadd.p */
RUN prodict/load_d.p ("mytable","/my/dir").
[/code]

These routines should be available on any installation of Progress.

As far as how we deploy our applications, I have done several methods. When installing on Unix, I wrote extensive shell scripts to extract/install the new code, run the dictionary load procedures and then compile.

On Windows, I create an installation CD with InstallSheild, and use an installation program written in Progress and supplied with RoundTable TSMS (take a look at http://www.roundtable-tsms.com/ for more information) to do everything, from loading new data, running custom update procedures, compiling code, etc... The program works exteremly well and most users don't have any problems at all installing updates. In fact we rarely get installation-related support calls anymore.

I would highly suggest taking a look at RoundTable, it truely will make your source code control, configuration management, and deployment headaches minimal.

 

[Ed Watson]

RoundTable

Minimal is an understatement! Roundtable is extremely powerful, extremely customizable with event hooks similar to Progress, easy to use APIs and source code provided for reports and utilities, and extremely useful in deploying applications.