OpenVMS Differences Document

[Pickering, John (NORBORD)]

My comments from an MPE/iX perspective. 
[or, more rantings from the 3000 bigot :-]

>There are two types - VMS and GEN. VMS are machine specific
>features that will not be available on other platforms.
OK with me. Most are VMS OS specific things that I have happily lived
without for many years.

>GEN are features that could be made available on other platforms
>(but may not be) or are already available. Keep in mind that I went
>through my lists and wanted to ensure that everything was included,
>so I may have erred on the side of caution.
These merit inspection! Like all Cognos documentation, much can be discerned
by reading between the lines.

My comments and questions:

- ERRORRECALL field option in Qdesign. I assume this means that the
incorrect contents of a field are redisplayed and available for in field
editing in the event of an error? If so, this would be a great addition.
Although I refuse to do it, I've seen too many custom error messages written
just to display fieldtext :-(

- SEMIEXCLUSIVE option of Qdesign FILE statements and Qtp SET FILE
statements. You state "syntax in 8.20" -- huh? This has been in both places
since before 5.09. Is there some change?

- REVERSE function. Add to Quiz and Qtp. I have never understood why all
functions aren't available in all components! Put this one in Quiz and Qtp
please!

- SET ... NOLIMIT. Please add this to all versions, recognizing of course
that there are machine imposed limits on file sizes. It really sucks to
rerun a trial balance again because the gl now has 3,000,001 transactions
and just broke the request/report limit :-(

- FORMATNUMBER function. What's this? Hopefully it takes a numeric
expression and a picture string and returns a string containing the number
formatted per the picture? Would be wonderful to have this in all
components.

- NOFORMAT field option in Qdesign. What's this? A field option to display
the contents of a data item "as is"? So we can really see what's in an item?
Great debugging tool!

- UPDATE procedure generation. Bottomup versus Topdown. You state that the
default in 8.2 will be bottomup. This is different from 8.19 which is, apart
from Image manual masters, topdown and has been since day one. Am I
misreading something? Such a change would seriously affect the item
statement processing of a lot of screens :-((

My only other comment would be to express concern that my support dollars
and probably most of the Cognos ADT resources are being spent primarily on
Vaxisms to the exclusion of other platforms.

Regards,
JWP
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