Ingres ABF 4GL macros

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Paul M. - 24 May 2007 04:38 GMT

hi all,

I a previous job I had at an Ingres site, in the 4GL code we use to put one
line macro labels that were expanded out to several lines of common code,
that would be visible in the final object code.

Being a raw graduate at the time, I didn't take much notice, but I am now
wondering how that was actually accomplished?

I don't beleive now that this is an Ingres ABF feature, but rather something
that was done at the OS level, in this case unix, like a big sed script.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

regards,

Paul M.

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Roy Hann - 24 May 2007 08:39 GMT

> Being a raw graduate at the time, I didn't take much notice, but I am now
> wondering how that was actually accomplished?
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>
> Can anyone shed some light on this?

m4?

Roy

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weasel - 24 May 2007 11:49 GMT

In Queensland (Australia) this was very commonly done.
vi was aliased to a shell script called vi. If you typed
vi file.osq
then the vi script would open a file called file.osq.pp or file.oss.
When you exited this editor, it ran m4 and/or cpp against the file to
expand the macros into ABF code and write this into the .osq file.

this allowed us to write stuff like:
MQTBegin
(sql statement)
MQTCheck
(sql statement)
MQTCheck
MQTEnd

to manage a multi-query transaction with multiple retries, deadlock
handling, etc.
It sure is easier than manually writing the nested loops to achieve
that.
Being able to use #include and #define for constants also helped a lot

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Karl & Betty Schendel - 24 May 2007 14:31 GMT

>hi all,
>
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>Being a raw graduate at the time, I didn't take much notice, but I am now
>wondering how that was actually accomplished?

One way to do it is to rename $II_SYSTEM/ingres/bin/oslsql to
something like oslsql.real, and make oslsql be a shellscript
that runs the 4GL source code through a macro expander like
cpp or m4. That's brute force, and you need to temporarily
put things back when you apply Ingres upgrades and patches;
but it does work very well. That's how we used to do it
at Telesis, years ago.

Karl

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OldSchool - 24 May 2007 20:42 GMT

On May 24, 9:31 am, Karl & Betty Schendel <schen...@kbcomputer.com>
wrote:

>.......expanded out to several lines of common code,
> that would be visible in the final object code.
>
> Being a raw graduate at the time, I didn't take much notice, but I am now
> wondering how that was actually accomplished?

You can also fiddle w/ ING_EDIT. one of the things that can be done
there is to make it a script that runs vi (or whatever) on the source,
and after exitting vi, run the macro processor (or visa-versa). you
might want to take a look at the "osq-debug" tool on the NAIUA web
site as it does something very similar to this in terms of processing.

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simonl@unwired.com.au - 30 May 2007 10:39 GMT

A very cool idea, Karl.

Of course, a significantly more cool idea would be to go down the
Transforge path which allows you to use OpenROAD's include scripts.

But I won't get on that hobby horse right now.

> >hi all,
> >
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
>
> Karl

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Sørensen.Henrik Georg HGS - 01 Jun 2007 08:46 GMT

As Karl has pointed out since the early days on Unix (in our case 6.1 Beta),
We've renamed oslsql to oslsql.real and made a shell-script instead replacing the handling of pre-compiling before calling the original oslsql.

The script could look like this.
#!/bin/sh
#
# OSLSQL February 1992
# UDV_HOME is our own development home-directoru
# UDV_INCL is the main catalog of our own include-files

[ "$UDV_HOME" = "" ] && $II_SYSTEM/ingres/bin/oslsql.real $*
a=${?}
[ "$UDV_HOME" = "" ] && exit $a

TMPFIL=/tmp/IICPP${$}.OSQ
/lib/cpp -P -C -I$UDV_INCL $6 | cat -r | pr -s -t -w16384 > $TMPFIL
set - $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $TMPFIL $7 $8 $9
$II_SYSTEM/ingres/bin/oslsql.real $*
a=${?}
rm -f $TMPFIL
exit $a

Meaning you in your osq-files can write things like

#define DATETODAYNO((DATEVAR)\
int4(interval('days', DATEVAR - date('1899_12_31')))

update my_table
set dayno = DATETODAYNO(:my_date)

and of couse use #include-files as well

The cat-command with pr my be different on you platform but is meant to remove comments and were more than one "space"-line, and depending on length
Of your defines to make line-shifts.

Kind regards
Henrik Georg Sørensen, Denmark

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: info-ingres-bounces@kettleriverconsulting.com [mailto:info-ingres-bounces@kettleriverconsulting.com] På vegne af simonl@unwired.com.au
Sendt: 30. maj 2007 11:39
Til: info-ingres@kettleriverconsulting.com
Emne: Re: [Info-Ingres] Ingres ABF 4GL macros

A very cool idea, Karl.

Of course, a significantly more cool idea would be to go down the
Transforge path which allows you to use OpenROAD's include scripts.

But I won't get on that hobby horse right now.

Karl & Betty Schendel wrote:

> At 3:38 AM +0000 5/24/07, Paul M. via DBMonster.com wrote:
> >hi all,
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>
> Karl

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