Tips on moving programs

There are five main steps in moving programs to Business Rules 4.x releases.

1. .) Save your current programs as SOURCE files.
2. .) Install the new release of Business Rules.
3. .) Load your programs from SOURCE to recompile them.
4. .) Resolve any minor incompatibilities, which may produce syntax errors in your programs.
5. .) SAVE or REPLACE your programs.

Saving And Reloading From Source

The programs must be saved as source. You can save them as source either by using the Save command in your current release of Business Rules, or by using the List command.

The source files must then be loaded from source using the Load command. Errors may be generated during the LOAD file-ref SOURCE due to a few minor incompatibilities between old and new releases. See Category:Error Codes and the error information in the help facility for details.

Standardized Scancodes

Starting with Release 3.0, Business Rules has minimized differences between keyboards by adopting a universal set of scan codes. A scan code is a two-part or four-part hexadecimal code associated with a keystroke (so called because it comes from scanning the keyboard). See the KSTAT$ function for information about determining the operating system and Business Rules scan codes.

Miscellaneous Tips

On Unix / Linux versions, any old WBTERM.OUT files must be recompiled using the 4.0+ release of the WBTERM compiler. Some printers on Unix / Linux systems may be affected by the new EOL= parameter with display files. This parameter defines the end-of-line separator (record delimiter) for display file processing. This parameter may be set to EOL=CRLF (carriage return and line feed), EOL=LF (line feed only), or EOL=NONE.

The default is CRLF for DOS and NetWork versions (just as in previous releases) however; the default is LF for Unix / Linux versions. This may affect Unix/Linux printers. If your printer requires a CR, there may be a hardware switch setting that can supply it. If this change causes you problems, please call us.

The default printer name will be PRN:/10 instead of PRN: as in earlier releases. This change was made to eliminate some SUBSTITUTE problems when you try to redirect output from the default printer to another printer. For current Unix/Linux systems, some of your SUBSTITUTE specifications will have to be changed.

Business Rules now opens serial ports to 9600 bits/second, no parity, eight data bits, one stop bit (an exception is that communications files default to 1200 bits/second). Formerly, the default was 300 bits/second.