The OpenEdge Hive

Motivation

I had to ask - why exactly are these images useful? I should have known the answer. How many times have you seen a project launched where, as the first step of the project, someone was told to take a screenshot of every window and write technical documentation for them all? I've seen it happen quite a few times. The worst part of a task like that is: How do you know that you managed to find every window in the system? Many windows and dialogs only appear under certain obscure conditions in the application logic. Gordon wrote: "The idea of the frame data and images is to use it as the start of a base technical document. I'll use the XML file to generate a Word document with all the info contained .. including the images etc ... then a Business Analyst will go through and add business documentation. Basically, we have no documentation to speak of and this is a way of getting a fairly good start ... so not only will it aid the developer but it will also aid the BA. Also, it's useful for those legacy apps where they can't be loaded into AppBuilder --- this makes it way easier to identify which field is actually used in which frame. Should reduce maintenance costs." Judy had a good point too. Users of an application may be familiar with the data on the screen, but unfamiliar with the database schema. If they want to use tools like Crystal for generating reports, they have a tough time matching screen data to database schema. I suspect that Gordon's work could easily be extended to provide exactly what the report-writing application users need.