Hello all,
I have been advised to post these questions on this newsgroup. We are nearing the completion of a long evaluation of differing application frameworks for .NET. We still have a handful of questions pending regarding StrataFrame. Please bear with us since we are new to .NET (coming from the Clarion world).
1. Enhancement idea: Add a quick layout tool. A user can select fields from a BO to populate on the screen and when they click OK, the fields appear in sequential order along with a caption to the left of each field and set to the appropriate control (or control type that was specified in the layout tool)
2. Some type of ability to cache data for offline usage. Be able to populate local BO's with data and persist it to disk (binary or XML) for updates, inserts and deletes. When reconnecting to the host system, ability to resync with the host.
3. Built-in support for data access/manipulation resilience. Our client's environments are not always "connected." It would be helpful to automatically retry a statement (sleep, try to send command, fail?->sleep). The number of retries should be configurable along with the sleep value. If the retry count is exceed, an exception should be thrown back up to the UI layer for user notification and within the BO log the exception to file.
4. Ability to push data down to the clients via a service. *** NOTE: We may be able to utilize SQL 2005 notification services. Need to investigate. However our clients are all using SQL 2000 (various versions including MSDE, Workgroup edition, etc.) so this will be an issue we must address in a common way that will work across differing versions of MS SQL.
5. Dynamic business rules. Give the user the ability to turn on/off "certain" business rules and add their own. For example, if in the base system First Name is not required but the clients BR state it should be, give the user the ability to turn on the requirement.
6. BO's automatically strip off trailing spaces from string type fields. We tried StrataFrame's trimming options and they do not work correctly: For some reason when the user is trying to enter information to a field with Trim Right on, we cannot type a simple “space” For example “Code 123” <-- the BO is trimming the space as we are typing. I am sure this is probably a “gremlin” in the framework somewhere.
7. When using the DDT importing databases, please add the ability to input keys/indexes/constraints and most importantly relationships. The Business Object Mapper might be able to detect the appropriate BO to tie to (optionally).
8. How does StrataFrame communicate business objects across tiers? Is it compressed? Can it be encrypted?
9. Are there any examples of separate tiers communicating using remoting? If so, where? If not can we be sent an example with steps to reproduce the applications?
10. Can BO's be split into separate libraries (IE: CommonTablesBO, AccountingBO, etc.) and still maintain relationships via properties or code?
11. Is CAB (Composite Application Block UI) support in your plans?
12. Is XAML support in your plans?
13. When populating BO's does the framework utilize the MARS support of SQL 2005 for asynchronous queries?
14. How can custom ID's be handled with your BO's? For example we have a names/business table with the following PK: TypeOfName (P or B) and NameNumber (automatically seeded to 1 for P and separately for B, programmatically) SQL Server does not auto-increment the NameNumber field, it is done in code.
15. What if anything is going to change now that WCF is available? How will that impact communications in StrataFrame if at all?
There are more questions but I would say they are not applicable to StrataFrame (IE: Abstract class support, In memory checkpointing, dynamic properties, etc.)
Thank you for all of your help! Bob and the developers at Strataframe have been wonderful to work with during this evaluation!
Ben Kim, Emergitech