Daynote ,Svenson

MM-lxxvi     Thuesday

2000-03-16

Almost dry. Well some barely perceptible drizzle in the morning and another drizzly shower at noon was all we got, while the forecast was for lots of rain. We did get the predicted amount of clouds (lots) and sunshine (none). And the temperature remained at about 8°C all day.

The morning was rather uneventful, with some file checking and picking up some reports from Jan. Ronny did most of the work and I did some assistance. The afternoon exploded however.

In OLI the items are maintained via a download procedure. The actual item numbers are composed in OPRS and then passed via and EDI messaging application to OLI. OPRS is a system built by the MSCC (contradictory named Microsoft Competence Centre). New items can be created in OLI as well but the OPRS is leading. The classification codes (four codes per item) are, in the current release, stored in the CD file but they must be maintained by hand. Because the codes are not mandatory for new items and not checked for existing items (unless they are changed manually) the CD file is never actually maintained.
Now, in preparation to the new r7v9 release a new OPRS to OLI procedure is produced and this requires the CD file to be filled. It doesn't provide a method to do so. And that preparation must be done (and tested) before the new release is installed.

For the HCC project I get the codes from OPRS and build the hierarchical structure. Well that is the intention. The building function is not ready, there are not even specs for it, and the data I got from OPRS for testing was totally inadequate and passed via Excel sheets. Now it seems we will get the data in Microsoft Access format. Of course not in the expected format.
Originally there was no haste to create the HCC filling program but now Loek got the idea that we could fill his CD file based on our HCC file. That probably occurred to him because in the original specifications the HCC file would be built based on the item file and the CD file. Why, we could just, simply, reverse that program to fill the CD file, couldn't we? Right?
Yea for some people life is simple.

I struggled with Access to get the data out and transferable to the AS/400. Well I did not see much of the famous Microsoft user friendliness. I ended up exporting to an Excel sheet and from there saving in a comma-delimited text file (the delimiters are actually semicolons). This could then be transferred to the AS400 where I build a program to parse the text lines and file the HCC file with it. And then another program to fill up the CD file based on the HCC codes. It is all untested yet of course but hey they wanted the program only immediately, not yesterday :-).

Finally I managed to set up Eudora light to retrieve the mail from my ISP account. Whenever I tried using Netscape I never got the mail, only some error message, and I lost the settings for my regular mail account. And using Outlook Express (Win98) I never got mail either but without error messages.

And, to round off a busy day I dug into Correl V4 to find a way to make a transparent background. But I never found out how to do it.

Adios