As we prepare for next month’s release of Valence 5.1, we thought it’d be both interesting and useful to summarize some of the blog post contents in a single, categorized list. From customizing the look and feel of the Valence Portal to tips on back-end and front-end development, there’s likely to be at least one or two blog posts to pique your interest. Without further ado, here’s a categorized breakdown of the more useful blog posts from the past few years:
- Put a link on it: Launching Valence apps directly from a URL – Send someone a link to directly access a Valence app, with or without the Portal
- Setting up a JSON Web service using Valence – Create your own REST-ful web service using the JSON tools in Valence
- Making a Valence app sticky (non closeable) – How to make an app stay active on the user’s launchpad
- Monitoring data going to and from your Valence apps – Keeping track of the data being fed to your apps, and watching for performance issues
- Auto-Creating user profiles – How to control the auto-create user profile function on login
- Customizing the look and feel of the Valence portal – Tips on customizing logos, graphics, etc.
- Adding your own custom settings to the Portal Admin app – Explains how to add custom global values that can be maintained in Portal Admin > Settings.
- Using a dynamically set app path – How to plug special substitution values into the path for launching a Valence app
Nitro Query
- Adding colorful pizzaz to grids – Draw user attention to cells with unusual values by altering its color properties
- Summary functions and column rendering – Tips for adding summary values and renderers to your grid columns
- Creating an RPG validation program for edit grid Query app – How to set up a more elaborate edit-checking mechanism on an edit grid
- Setting up click events – Explains how to alter dashboard contents based on user events in the app
Sencha Architect
- Building and deploying apps in Valence 5 – Lays out the recommended approach to creating and deploying Valence apps to the IFS using Architect
- Migrating AutoCode-generated apps from Valence 4 to Valence 5 – Instructions for upgrading AutoCode-generated apps that were created using Ext JS 4.2 in Valence 4 to Ext JS 6 in Valence 5
RPG Development Tips
- Launching a Valence app from a 5250 Green Screen session – Explains how to use VVRMTCALL to integrate Client Access sessions with Valence apps (i.e., user hits a function key in a 5250 program to see a chart pop up in his browser)
- Creating complex JSON arrays – demonstrates how to use RPG Next Gen’s JSON utility to create nested JSON arrays
- Adding “Record in Use” soft locking to your Valence apps – A primer on using Valence’s record lock utility to know when someone else is editing a record
- Adding custom styling to Excel spreadsheet cells – How to adjust the template file used for spreadsheet generation
- Uploading and consuming spreadsheets – A walk through the example code demonstrating how to upload and consume a .csv file in an RPG program
- Understanding back-end issues with the Errors app – Explains how to maximize use of back end error logging
- Making your Valence apps hacker-resistant
Ext JS and other Front-End Development Tips
- Handling null dates in date selectors – How to elegantly handle the “null date” (0001-01-01) in an Ext JS Date Selector
- Making your apps multilingual – Putting Valence’s multilingual literals concept to use in your apps
- Using your own PC as a test machine for the front-end – How to test your front-end development work on your own PC prior to deploying to the IFS
- Communicating data between apps – Launching one app from within another app and passing in pertinent data
- Are you sure you want to leave this app? – How to help users avoid inadvertently closing their app tab before clicking Save.
- Fun with date formatting – Tips on formatting dates in Ext JS.
IBM i Apache Server
- Useful information extractable from the Apache Server – List of useful CGI environment variables you can extract from your Apache server instance — i.e., via vvUtility_getEnvVar()
- Setting up external access with SSL – Step by step instructions for setting up an https site for your Valence instance