Progress Engineer vs. Independent Contractor

J

JLovegren

New Member
I am "managing" an in-house developed ERP system, used by 50 people. It started in version 8 and went live in version 9.1e back in the early 2000's. I have had good support from my programmer but he has retired, left California and so I have been keeping it running with chewing gum and scotch tape.

I recently licensed version 12.8 and gone through the steps to migrate my data. I hired Progress DBA services to aid in the setting up of things like Level II storage (also received a boat-load of useful advice here) and settings for the data server, AI archiving, etc. I believe the database is running well now.

I am now running into some issues with the application itself. I own all the source code. I can't tell for sure but I believe the initial startup program makes some Windows calls that are outdated (Example below).
PROCEDURE WinExec EXTERNAL "krnl386.exe": DEFINE INPUT PARAMETER prog_name AS CHARACTER. DEFINE INPUT PARAMETER visual_style AS SHORT.
My application code has adm and adm2 folders, I found that I needed to copy the new ones from v12.8 ...

The rendered windows on v9 and one size, but completely smaller and cramped, with many not fitting the text into the fixed window / frames.

The point is, I need help. I am asking for opinions.

  1. Hire Progress to assist?
  2. Hire an independent contractor?
  3. Hire a company?
  4. How to locate help? (The contractor forum here is not updated).

I don't have a lot of budget and I need to scope it - get help but I can do the grunt work and want to know how to do it myself (I need to know how to maintain and do tweaks, I do not need to know how to modernize the application with updated calls, etc.).

Scope:
Review how my application is started (.pf and .ini) for best practices.
Review the login screen, main menu for updates ( Windows related calls, etc.)
Recommend some basic changes as needed. All windows are static sized, maybe some re-sizing would be good.
I will have to re-do the layout of every frame in every windows / browser / dialog to get it to fit comfortably on v12. When I save a change to, say a Smart Viewer, (only sizing and positioning), I get an error related to the "Smart Query" saying that the database or fields are not what is expected in "send recs" or something like that, I need a tutorial on how to deal with that (identify the issue and solve the problem) without my fumbling around looking for any inconsistency.
Add a couple of database triggers.
Help me rework an issued I have with the backspace on a large editor field.
Solve an issue I have with how serial numbers are done in the current system. I need to de-couple the lot number from the serial table.
 
I don't envy you. I used to work on an app with a GUI client and there are lots of issues that can arise with compiled code. The r-code of a GUI client incorporates not just the functionality in the source but also a number of aspects of the compile machine/Windows session/ABL session. This include defined colours, the font list, the usable desktop space, window metrics like scrollbar size and taskbar height, desktop resolution, and probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten or blocked out due to trauma. ;) This is particularly problematic when compilation happens at high resolution and the code is run with a low-resolution display.

These issues can cause frames that are too wide to fail to render, or "hit spacebar to continue" messages when the window is too tall for the display. I have had issues where the client machines had the same fonts installed as the compile machine. Or at least they appeared to be the same at first glance, i.e. they had the same names. But fonts are software, and they are versioned. There can be functional differences in two different sets of r-code that use the same fonts with different version numbers. There are lots of little pitfalls like this with the GUI client.

I second Tom's recommendation. The folks at Consultingwerk are respected experts.
 
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