refreshing shadow

[martinwcole]

does anyone know of a way to display a custom screen or bitmap when refreshing the shadow? While I have good code in place that deals with 2 people refreshing at the same time, I have a couple of "nervous mervis"'s who are rebooting during the process. And although I also have code that deals with that, the client wants a better display screen like in big bold letters "Please Wait - Installing new software" As far as I know there is no way to accomplish this with V5 (or on any version, for that matter.) Any ideas?

[Tom Cone Jr]

Perhaps a big, hard to miss, text box, at the beginning of the process that explains what's about to happen and tells them they'll lose their first born if they interrupt it.

-- tom

[martinwcole]

Tom, I have "refresh shadow automatically" set, so as far as I know, unless there is a different approach I could take, I don't have access to the system until AFTER the refresh is finished.

As I think about it, I guess I could handle the refresh with code. Have you ever taken that approach. Although, even then, I think Alpha's blank grey screen will display-over anything I throw up, anyway, during the refresh.

I know of at least 2 well known programmers who swear once an app boots, there is virtually no difference in run time speed. While I have never tried that approach, I guess I could try it on one machine.

But unless I am mistaken, ALL of everything traverses the LAN if it isn't shadowed. I'm not sure about variables and querries, but I guess they would still belong to each session/user.

[Tom Henkel]

Martin,

When we deployed v5 live, we were told that the only way to see any speed is to shadow the apps. I have 200+ users, so using Alpha's shadow building solution won't work. Our chief accountant came up with a simple, elegant solution. We build the shadow on one machine, then zip it to a self-extracting zip file and place that on the server. We keep a file of shadowed databases, and their shadow version number (we use the date, ie: 20060406) on the server. Using a program called Ground control, we query the shadow/version file, and a text file of each shadowed database (on the client PC) If the server version is newer, then we execute te server self-extracting zip which unzips the shadow database to the client's shadow folder.

The beauty of this solution is that it all happens at PC boot time, not App load time. The user is used to waiting for the machine to boot so there is much less consternation on the user's part. With our number of users, this saves me a great deal of complaints.

Tom

[martinwcole]

Tom - that is brilliant. I am going to check up on ground control. I have an app that runs in a hospital, and that would be a major improvement in updating the shadow. They very infrequently turn off the computers or even restart, so I would need to run it at app-boot time. Would be interesting to see how you deal with this. Do you copy the zip from the server to the workstation, and then run the zip locally? I'm not sure how one would do this at bootup - maybe check files on the server and see if a newer version was available, instruct the user to Click on an icon on their desktop, and then close the app.

[Tom Henkel]

You could incorporate the Ground control routines in the app startup. When the users click on the ICon, just run a ground control script to do the whole shadow check routine, then launch the application when finished.

Here is our GC code that the user's workstations use. It insures that no other version of "Alpha" is running, maps the appropriate drives, then launches the application.

If(FindWindow("*Social Services*"),DoNothing,GoTo("Continue"))
MessageBox("Another Version of Social Services is Running, Cannot Continue",Exclamation)
ExitMacro()
:Continue
// Test if user is allowed to map Drive F
ClearList()
ClearVariables()
LoadList("\\whopper\UserInformation$\Supvlist.txt")
GetListCount(%counter)
GetSystem(%username,USER_NAME)
// MessageBox(%username)
If(FindInList(%username,CaseInsensitive),DoNothing(),GoTo(":skipit"))
UnmapDrive("F")
If(IsOSVersion("Windows 98"),MapDrive("F","\\percy\a5share\pers$",Default),GoTo(":netuse"))
GoTo(":skipit")
:netuse
RunProgram("net use F: \\percy\a5share\Pers$",Minimized)
:skipit
UnmapDrive("O")
// RunProgram("net use O: \\percy\a5share",Minimized)
UnmapDrive("G")
RunProgram("net use G: \\whopper\v5share",Minimized)
If(FileExist("C:\Program Files\A5V5Runtime\shadow\socsvcs.adb"),RunProgram("C:\Program Files\A5V5Runtime\Alpha5.exe  C:\Program Files\A5V5Runtime\Shadow\Socsvcs.Adb  -INCLUDE=G:\Socsvcs.startup",Maximized),RunProgram("C:\Program Files\A5V5Runtime\Alpha5.exe  G:\Socsvcs.Adb  -INCLUDE=G:\Socsvcs.startup",Maximized))
// RunProgram("C:\Program Files\A5V5Runtime\Alpha5.exe  \\whopper\v5share\Socsvcs.Adb  -INCLUDE=\\whopper\v5share\Socsvcs.startup",Maximized)
If(FindWindow("Finished - net"),CloseWindow("Finished - net"),DoNothing())
If(FindWindow("Finished - net"),CloseWindow("Finished - net"),DoNothing())
ExitMacro()