Making Your Modifications Upgradeable – Guy Hodgdon, MKT Software Designs, Inc. and James Leung, JTL Business Solutions

Guy Hodgdon

This presentation was given by two individuals, Guy Hodgdon and James Leung.  Both speakers presented information and code examples for successful AccountMate software modification techniques.

Guy Hodgdon discussed his company’s process for implementing software modifications.  He said that his company had been dealing with several problems that instigated the initial process of AccountMate modification.  His client upgrade cycle were costly and time consuming, his clients were refusing to upgrade to current versions because of repeated high costs, his staff was limited to the number of upgrades that could be performed in a given time frame, and he needed to find a way to support more client upgrades with an expanding client base while maintaining his existing company structure.  The objectives that were paramount for this project were:

·        Reduce upgrade costs to clients.

·        Increase company productivity.

·        Increase modification documentation and readability.

·        Keep clients on the most current builds and versions.

·        Reduce modification costs

·        Reduce support costs.

Once modification processes began, Jim reminded the audience that over 90% of screen form changes are stored in a Visual Class Library.  He explained that this meant that in many cases a patch is provided simply by providing a new class library file.  His company used a technique in which modifications will build themselves during runtime.  The means that the modifications will be built “on the fly” during runtime when the user loads the form.  The user sees the build, but only the user with a slower machine will notice a difference in runtime.  Jim then went over some coding examples for modifications in AMADDON.PRG, Init(), and some Class Library Files. 

Jim explained the importance of documenting all changes so that your changes can be compared to the upgrade modifications made by AccountMate.  Compare your methods with AccountMate’s to determine which changes are the most efficient.  Jim’s company uses their MKT Programming Tools to determine exactly where the changes are that were made by AccountMate’s upgrades.

James Leung

James Leung began his section of the presentation by emphasizing the importance of education of AccountMate source code, research, analysis and design methodologies, programming consistency, and documentation, documentation, documentation.

The procedures that James stressed the importance of were:

• Locating source code.
• Placement of source code.
• Updating front end and back end data files.
• Using tools provided by AccountMate to perform updates.
• Naming modified files.
• Mininize the need to directly modify AccountMate procedures.
  • Centralize code by creating new methods or functions.
  • Create centralized forms where data structures are most similar.
  • Place new form controls on a separate page.
  • Document all modified code.

James suggests that programmers let AccountMate maintain your front end and back end changes for System Table updates.  Updating the correct tables in AccountMate will allow AccountMate to maintain all of your company’s data files and relieve you from having to update the data files whenever you add a new company.

James stated that there are several areas that are crucial for developer to understand before performing any modifications:

• The AccountMate base classes - these classes sometimes change during upgrades.

• T-SQL – including select, insert, update, delete, stored procedures, triggers, cursors, temporary tables, variables, indexes, and performance tuning processes.

Crystal Reports modifications usually account for 70% of all modifications performed in AccountMate, so understanding how AccountMate interfaces with reports and SQL Server will decrease development time.

The last point that James expressed was that “most developers have trouble with consistency because of evolving technology and experience.  A process that was being used a year ago may be obsolete or needs to be refined.  Consistent programming techniques and documentation procedures is extremely important to making modifications upgradeable.”

Go back to the main AccountMate Summit 2003 page, or visit our home page featuring reviews of all the top products. 

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