In the real life of business people Excel spreadsheets play an important role. They are easy to create, easy to modify, easy to deliver. Copy – Paste – modify is the standard Excel (programming) activity. Cells named by row and column represent the data model (or object model if you prefer). This is easy and absolutely not scalable. In my personal real life as manager of my company I have Excel spreadsheets as everybody else. And I have to consolidate them, sometimes over many years. By whatever reason, in 2002 some data might be in column D which is in 2003 to 2005 in column E and since 2006 in column F. Doing the consolidation in VBA is almost as painful as doing it manually (unifying the original spreadsheets), while the latter has the extra challenge to be error-prone. Our silver bullet is Smalltalk. I create a real object model for the business presented in the spreadsheets, I use COM Connect to populate the object model, I use Smalltalk to transform the objects (consolidate), and use COM Connect to create Excel spreadsheets in the format desired for the consolidated information.
How to Use ODBCEXDI to Handle JSON Data in Cincom® VisualWorks® JSON data type support has been popular in the last few years since it provides greater flexibility for users. While not all of the database management systems have this feature available at this time, most of the modern DBMSs support JSON in one way or another....
Windows-Centric The Business Man’s Thinking Tool Cincom® ObjectStudio® allows business owners, managers and decision-makers to work together with software developers in creating solutions that solve real problems. Using tools like […]...
Easing Frustration with Round Trip Engineering In his own words, Mark Grinnell, the ObjectStudio Engineering Manager for Cincom Smalltalk describes why round-trip engineering is such a valuable asset in the product....
