shaunsoft

Back at my desk on a gloriously sunny Monday morning, in true Cumbrian style it pours down all weekend and manages to find some sunshine on Monday morning!  A morning of Windows update nightmares…it’s amazing how Vista manages to find so many updates when you’re all fired up and ready to get stuck into some good work!  So whilst my PC is busy doing whatever it feels like I thought that I would scribble a few lines about what I’ve been up to development wise this last week and what’s planned for the next.

I pretty much spent all last week working on ‘Frequency’ for the next update of CTX, when we…no,  I should confess ..  When I came up with the new ‘request model’ I really didn’t think through the full implications for regular journeys and Frequency, in particular ‘List Based’ frequency, there isn’t space here to go into detail suffice to say that the ‘new Frequency List’ management was massively complicated to implement as it no longer simply updates the lists but EVERY journey that uses the list and of course we have to handle changes to lists, new lists and so forth……It was horrible to do, however I’m very pleased with the results…..on the downside the work has highlighted a  number of issues that should have been considered further in the new ‘Request Window’….particularly with modification to existing requests, my week is going to spent checking and double checking everything that can be done with regular requests and make sure that the changes are handled properly and consistently.  Some of you will be particularly pleased to read that as part of this I have modified the ‘every number of days’ frequency type to support multiple days, which means you can in one request  say that a journey goes for every ‘number of days’ e.g. 14, every Monday and Friday, without having to uses list based frequency.

My main task for this week is getting the tool written to convert existing CTX databases to support the new model, which for most people will be a quick almost instant process,  however as is always the case there a some installations that will be complicated mainly because of the sheer number of requests they use CTX to manage, I’m talking about people who use CTX to manage over 30,000 trips a month (some are more than this figure daily!),  the main issue with these projects is simply the amount of time it will take to process each trip as typically these requests are many years long and occur every day and unfortunately there is no escape from the fact that the update tool will have to inspect and update every journey for every day in the life of each request!  That is going to be a long time staring at egg timers and very slowly moving progress bars. I am trying however to make it as efficient as possible and enable control over how the update is done…enabling it to be done in manageable chunks.

As a diversion from this I’ll also be putting a bit of time into Spotlight 2, which is now well underway, we have lofty ambitions for Spotlight 2. I’ve already completed stage one of the process and included the ‘Reporting Services’ based reports  (.ctr reports) and the new ‘Quick Reports’ not only into Spotlight but thorough out CTX. This week I intend to finish the new ctxWrite , which has now also merged into Spotlight. I think people will love the new ‘ctxWrite editor’,  it gives you so much control over your documents. Once this is finished I just have to add the new ‘ctXtra’ reports to Spotlight and the rest of CTX !….Ahh!, it’s just crossed my mind you probably have no idea what the ‘Quick Reports’  and ctXtra reports are!…..Oh well , I’ll have to leave that one to another blog entry as Vista seems to have finished its never ending cycle of reboots and I’d better get stuck into the update tool !