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PI documenter services has been upgraded to include User defined functions

The first release of the open source version of the documenter library did not have support for the newest PHPExcel. It was therefore not deployed as a service on the figaf homepage. I have now upgraded the service to support the newest release. The functionality is still free and works the same way.

I finally got time to work with the code and fund the bug, which did not allow for the newest PHPExcel library. The problem was that I had to much reuse of functions. When I created a difference document, I created two documentation documents. The mapping information was then extracted from the two documents and compared to create the difference document. I created a new Excel serializer to write the different documents, a problem occurred.

I also go time to a feature, which I have been requested. That was to get user defined functions in the documentation. A more needed function was to include the UDF in the difference functions, so it is possible to see which user defined function has changed.

For the documentation I have decided not to include comments. I believe comments for this instead should be included in the source code. Is this a plausible way to look at things, or should I reconsider the design?

I have not had access for a PI 7.1 system. If you are running 7.1 would you test my service and see if it works. If it is not working would you send the XIM file and I will create a new version, which allows for PI 7.1 User defined mappings.

Do you have any other request for functionality, then comment in this blog or in the google defect log.

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Release of PI documenter tools as open source

I released the two services for PI to get documentation of mappings and to compare two mappings to see what have changed. The release to those services can be found in the two
blogs.

After the release people have been asked if it was possible to run the tools at the users own computer instead of the server version. And I have been thinking about releasing the scripts as commercial products to accommodate this request. It is possible to create compiled PHP code, which can be executed at local PC’s. I did decide against it because it would require a product to be more mature then the product is and did not believe the marked was large enough and marketing would be difficult. By releasing the product as open source it might be possible to get other to contribute and create a service, which could help many more.

The product was original designed to run on a server in a controlled environment. But with this version I had to refactor some of the code to support the usage a client perspective. A problem is that script is extracting a lot of files from the XIM files. These files need to be cleaned up and I used the quick solution to use the windows Delete command to do this clean up. There are some other places which have not been cleaned up yet, they will be cleaned up in the next release.

One of the challenges with releasing software as open source is that it exposes ones coding capabilities. I would say that there is a long way to go before I’m able to get a living from coding PHP. The code seems to work, but the refactoring is a little more time consuming.

You can find the code and installation guides at code.google.com.

If you want to help with improving the code, please join the group and help improve the product.